LangPrism is a crowdsourcing service-rendering web content

Hello, respected Hebraist!

I want to introduce you to our project on national transfer Internet LangPrism. Crowdsourcing has long been ranked in all spheres of human activity and the use of crowdsourcing to the field of translation, is not something particularly new, however, we decided to look at a few different parties and want to present you my point of view in our project. Perhaps he's already familiar to many in our translations here, on Habre (translations, translations, another translation), but, nevertheless, I decided to publish a separate post to talk about it in more detail.

Under the cut you will also learn about the new habré in Japanese, do not miss!

Praeteritum

About two years ago, Microsoft held among his community loyalty program ITBonus, in which it promoted various activities related to Microsoft products. Among them was the translation of technical articles and blogs on Microsoft technologies. I actively participated in this program and even visited a couple of times in first place in the ranking. However, from the beginning I was very upset by the lack of opportunity to share your translation. There was no other way but to send the html file with the translation in the mail to the organizers. Not to mention the fact that to edit the translation also had to manually using the developer tools in Chrome.
Then came the idea, why not make this service, which will allow the interpreter directly in the context of the web page to change its content and others to view is already translated content. A little developing this idea, it became clear that it is very similar to the concept of Wikipedia.

the Big Idea

Our big idea is to combine the idea of Wikipedia and Google Translate. Literally, you visit a website in a foreign language, use LangPrism and if Wikipedia you have the opportunity to write enciklopedio article, LangPrism allows you to contribute by translating a web page into another language. In this case, your translation immediately becomes available to other users, allowing them to read foreign web publications in their own language.



Work is still installed in the browser extensions LangPrism that exists all modern browsers: native extension for Chrome extension and as a bookmarklet for other browsers. When you activated the following occurs:

the

the
• Contents of the original page is sent to the server.
the
• the Server returns fragments of this page has already been translated by users.
the
• Finally, you get user interface translation directly on the original page and you can translate by clicking the right button on the offers.

Once translated sentence on some website remains in the system translation memory and may be checked out with further queries. Thus, after some time the system itself will perform the role of a global translation memory that can be used not only for translation of web content, but also in other areas, for example, when translating technical texts, instructions, etc.

Praesens

Now LangPrism extension for Chrome used by about 1,400 people, the number of registered users about 420. A considerable contribution to the translation also make anonymous users, translating to a total of 100,000 words in a month. Sites for translation selects the community on the basis of their preferences, the distribution of the number of the translated content by domains is now as follows:


During the existence of the project was translated over 400,000 words, which is comparable to the volume of the two texts of War and peace or a solid five 300-page books. This is very good considering that the cycle of writing one book is approximately 1 year. One of the most popular sites, which brings our community is technology blog TechCrunch.



To date, the role of moderators in the system fulfill the users themselves, and the simplest mechanism to combat spam. By analogy with Wikipedia, we did a post-moderated model add a translation, so any translation immediately becomes available to other users. Now one of directions of our work is to develop intelligent technologies counteract the distortion of meaning in translation, which will make it easier to control the quality of the process of crowdsourcing translations.



Recently the service introduced a section of Translations, where the most popular foreign articles found on the Internet. It provides the ability for translators to translate important articles and allow other people to be aware of the most interesting that appears in the network. The section decorated like the popular services aggregation of interesting content. A sort of VOX in Russian. For assistance in the study of UX thank you, Chipsadesign.



The flip side of all visible translation work on web pages is community portal LangPrism. It is a kind of social network for translators, which allows them to solve the issues of cooperation in the joint translation, compile glossaries and agree on the style of the translation. Each translator has on the community portal your profile. The portal provides live feed, which shows the last added user translations, and a rating from the user community collected on the number of translated words.

Harry Potter in Russian

Now one of the most active areas of work for translators is the translation of the game based on the books about Harry Potter Pottermore. Browser games proved to be an excellent niche for the application of LangPrism, since there is no other way to "pull" them localized content if the official translation is missing, no. Pottermore is used in flash, but the main text is written in html, which makes it easy to translate. The translators used translation Pottermore, just posted the translation on specialized forums or in groups Vkontakte. To use it you had to open two browser Windows and compare the source text with the translation in order to understand something. Now as glad as the translators who have an excellent translation tool, and simple players who the incident was referred to as magic. Users LangPrism managed three weeks Pottermore fully translated on Russian language, contributing more than 80,000 translated words.

Habr Japanese

Not so long ago service was interested in translators from Japan. Suddenly, they began to translate the Habr in the Japanese language. You can try to use Apanhar right now. If this trend continues, we have a chance soon to broadcast to aponojerser in their native language! Taishiro, Yukihiro thanks for contributing!

Futura

In the future plans to make LangPrism a kind of standard for exchanging multilingual information on the Internet, because now in different languages sufficiently important and useful information that makes no sense each time to generate again. Just enough information to build cultural bridges between different languages and the total value accumulated in the world, will be available to everyone. As in the time of Wikipedia has provided a tool which allowed to make a cast of all knowledge possessed by mankind, and we want to give the opportunity to bring this and many other information for each user on the Internet.
I would like to invite all of abrusio to participate in this project, and if everyone who reads this article will make at least one transfer, will share her ideas or other help, we are one step closer to this truly big goal.
Welcome to LangPrism.

Article based on information from habrahabr.ru