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Star Army In Other Languages?

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I've got a chance to get some free translation services with the site. So I'm asking you: if the Star Army supported another language, what language would you like to see support for?

The poll only has 10 options because that's the forum's limit, but you're free to insert them as your own suggestion in the replies. Some major languages that are not on there are Arabic, Hindi, and Mandarin.

Note that in the past (circa 2005) we've tried to provide limited support for Spanish and Japanese (we used to run stararmy.jp).

The winning options will be implemented as language options on the forums and wiki and I'll look into translation options for them.
 
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I am presuming that this is a form of machine translation. Having experience with that on my job I know it is problematic at best. Is the translation going to be for the Wiki, the forum or both? Machine translation works so so when you deal with well written sentences and such. But it falls apart when you start trying to have it work on dialog.
 
It would be for the site in genenral. In particular I'm looking at the free plan for Dakwak.
 
I'm honestly not thinking this would make a good impact on the system. We take part in English. Machine translations are shaky at best, especially when you start dealing with things that aren't in a normal diction, like happen to be ALL over SARP. And past there, as much trouble as we have with spelling/grammar from people who actually know/speak english to at least some extent, I can only imagine it would be even worse with a machine trying to parse what they're saying.
 
It might still help someone access SARP though, and if it's free, why not?

Though I am curious -- does the service impact our site's speed or SEO?
 
I don't think it would really impact either. The translated version is hosted on the company's servers, not this one.
 
To be honest this is just a waste of resources for the site. Our roleplays are posted in the English language, because thats the kind of language we use, there is no reason really for us to translate into Hispanic, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, or any other language since those indivisuals would have to post in English anyway in order to take part in our community (because it wouldn't be far to have a person posting in Japanese in a plot that is primarily run by English speakers, as not all English speakers fully understand the language)
 
While I appreciate the idea of offering SARP in another language. If it requires going to another site for them to read, then back to SARP to actually post. That's not a very effective customer experience. If there was a way that while on SARP, they could click something to see the translation that would be good. Even if you ignore the problems with machine translation of colloquialisms. There is the fact that SARP has a multitude of words in other languages, and languages that do not exist. All of which make it problematic.
 
I was thinking of it more like an advertisement. If it gets people to see our content in another language, they might want to come here and join up. Yes, at that point they need to use English, but if they're capable, why not?
 
And how do you convey that they have to go to the English site to actually post.
 
Nashoba said:
And how do you convey that they have to go to the English site to actually post.
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The site allows me to edit translated pages, so I could put the info in there. Heck, maybe we could even use the forum's bot features to make the translator's robot see a special message on the top of every forum page with a link to the main forum. This way the link would carry to the translated page.
 
...I kind of feel this is redundant. We do our roleplaying under the English language. Going the translation route just feels like... uneven presentation.
 
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