polyglottis Triglot Newbie Switzerland Joined 3822 days ago 7 posts - 10 votes Speaks: French*, English, German
| Message 1 of 9 02 July 2014 at 2:53pm | IP Logged |
Hi Everyone,
I am developing an open platform to share and translate language resources. It is called Polyglottis:
http://polyglottis.org/
Here is a screenshot:
If you want to get involved or just have some comments, please let me know!
Cheers,
Olivier
Edited by polyglottis on 03 July 2014 at 12:58pm
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emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5549 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map
| Message 2 of 9 02 July 2014 at 3:49pm | IP Logged |
Interesting! It looks sort of like a wiki for parallel texts at the moment.
However, just a suggestion, in my role as moderator: We discourage "drive-by link dropping", where people show up, post one message advertising their product or site, and then promptly disappear. In this case, you project looks interesting, and it's supported by a Swiss non-profit, so I've decided to leave it up. But if you are interested in feedback from the HTLAL community, I encourage you to stay around and participate in the discussion.
I also have a question: Have you considered adding audio recordings to your site? This would make it possible to read and listen to a conversation at the same time, which many people find useful.
Edited by emk on 02 July 2014 at 3:49pm
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polyglottis Triglot Newbie Switzerland Joined 3822 days ago 7 posts - 10 votes Speaks: French*, English, German
| Message 3 of 9 02 July 2014 at 4:23pm | IP Logged |
Dear emk,
Indeed, I have read the warning concerning posting in this room, but I thought the content would be appropriate for this forum.
The project is indeed a wiki for parallel texts, notes and transcriptions. And yes, adding audio is definitely a feature we need. We are going to add it to the prototype shortly.
If you have other suggestions, fire at will :)
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nicozerpa Triglot Senior Member Argentina Joined 4343 days ago 182 posts - 315 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Portuguese, English Studies: Italian, German
| Message 4 of 9 02 July 2014 at 8:50pm | IP Logged |
Great idea, I like it!
My suggestion is to take into account regional differences in spelling, vocabulary and audio recordings within the same language. One example can be found in the screenshot, where the word "heisst" is written using the Swiss spelling. I can imagine a Swiss person traslating the first sentence as "Wie heisst du?" and another user, from Germany or Austria, translating the third sentence as "Ich heiße Gieri".
It will be very useful in languages with many variations, like Spanish, or in languages where regional varieties matter, such as Portuguese.
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Illusion Newbie United States Joined 4341 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean
| Message 5 of 9 02 July 2014 at 10:25pm | IP Logged |
Do you have an estimation of how long it will be until you have the program ready for
use? I'd love to try it. Make sure you implement a good search feature for later when
hopefully there will be many texts on the site.
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shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4461 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French
| Message 6 of 9 03 July 2014 at 3:00am | IP Logged |
Before I get involved... is this intended to be an encyclopedia like Wikipedia? Or for people to post texts
to be translated between languages?
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polyglottis Triglot Newbie Switzerland Joined 3822 days ago 7 posts - 10 votes Speaks: French*, English, German
| Message 7 of 9 03 July 2014 at 12:57pm | IP Logged |
@nicozerpa
Indeed, language variations should be available. I can imagine having a main translation, and then a few alternatives. The trick is to make this available but still user-friendly.
@Illusion
We are planning with a first release in September. I hope we will honour the deadline!
And yes, we will work on the search feature and let users sort by date and filter by topic or by difficulty level.
@shk00design
We want to keep the platform open and provide APIs so that people can use the data. Just like Wikipedia does, but we don't have the same focus. Wikipedia focuses on exact and up-to-date meaning, whereas we want to make sure our texts and translations are linguistically correct. In particular, we are not going to let users modify a text wildly after it has been translated into other languages.
We really want to let people build language courses "bottom-up": people enter texts, then translate and annotate them; and when there are enough contents we can start structuring them into chapters or whole courses.
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polyglottis Triglot Newbie Switzerland Joined 3822 days ago 7 posts - 10 votes Speaks: French*, English, German
| Message 8 of 9 07 July 2014 at 5:45pm | IP Logged |
There you go, we have just added a new text in French, including audio!
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