Built In Translation For The Forum

Are there any readily available options for translating posts into your native language? I don’t know anything about this forum software, but it seems extensible. It would be cool to be able to have an option to translate posts into whatever language I want, via Google translate or some such service.

Into the foreign end user’s language? Haven’t seen much.

For going from other languages to English, this exists:

However, the translation API’s are paid and I have read about instances of people running up bills in excess of $1,000.

Please do feel free to read those and tell me if I’ve missed anything.

I half had the thought of just making my own userscript or browser extension, and running that through the google translate api. Maybe I’ll take a stab at that and see how it looks.

Obviously nobody expects you guys to pay for something that I’m just too lazy to do myself.

I mean, the latter part about translating things into English is a valid concern. We encourage people to post in their native language, and then spend a non-zero amount of time using translate ourselves.

If this was $10-20 a month I’m sure we’d go for it, but my concerns about going substantially over that are, well, substantial concerns :slight_smile:

The translate API is $10 per 1 million characters, and it will run EVERYTHING through the API to determine if a translation is needed. That’s how the bills rack up.

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Interesting. Perhaps a custom plugin for the forum software, where it runs a handful of of text characters through a local English dictionary to see if there are any matches, and if not then it could run the google api. Or maybe you could ask users put in their language preference, and you could just translate the non-English posts to English.

It still seems like a local userscript that does the work would be a better, cheaper alternative. And they’re compatible with Firefox and Chrome, and probably Edge too since that’s using chromium now I think. Each user would probably just have to get a translate api key themselves, and then you could just hit a button on each post you wanted translated.

I don’t know if it would work with this forum, but in a previous life, I used GTranslate for a client which worked out pretty good - it wasn’t perfect, but what is? As I recall, it wasn’t a beast to get running.

Hi, Google allows to translate an URL and display the entire page in different languages

Hi.

Quite a thread resurrection :grinning: .

IME the translation programs tend to only “work” with latin based or latin derived languages.
In parentheses, because specialized jargon and technical language for some odd reason is very hard to translate.
The harder the further apart the language families and branches are.

English is not my native language -that should not come as a surprise when reading my ramblings :wink:- and since finnish is for multiple reasons one of the hardest languages to auto-translate, I would not imagine to write in finnish, and assume someone would be able to translate it with anything available today.
Nor would I imagine or even attempt translating any posts, on any language, on any discussion forums to finnish.
That would only bring heaps of misunderstandings and possibly bad feelings.

Regards,
Sam