Auto-translating forums

My Edu2.0 education site currently support 10 languages. To facilitate translating the site we wrote a web-based system that allows translators to convert key words and phrases from English to another language. This has worked very well, and now the site is kept up-to-date by translators all over the world.

However, one of the issues that still remains is how to support our forums with an international audience. For example, since 65% of our members are English, most of the forum postings are also in English. When a member posts something in Spanish, I would have to use Google translation to convert it into English, then write a response in English, then finally tranlate my reply back to Spanish before posting to the forum. Nasty.

So yesterday we added full automatic translation for all our forums.

When someone posts to a forum, we store the posting and its original language setting. If someone who speaks a different language reads the post, we automatically call Google translate and display the translated version with the original version. We also cache the translated version so the next time the same thing happens the translation is instantaneous.

Next week we will add auto-translation to our messaging and chat system as well.

It's really fun to see in action. To see what it's like, visit this public thread and then select the Spanish language using the flag icon at the top of the page:

http://www.edu20.org/community_forum/thread?thread=6832

Here's a snapshot of the thread showing the translated and original versions of each post:

   

Comments

[Phillip]

Graham,

That's a really cool feature. Is there documentation on how to use the Google translate API?

[Graham Glass]

Yes, Google "Google translation API" ;-)