Crowdsourced Translation

Question

I once saw a free translation management software that was used to publish the original software texts and allow translation to other languages in a collaborative way. Something similar to http://www.mtranslator.com/ but also allowed community driven additional translations.

I just cannot seem to find it again so I was wondering if anyone knows of it? Cheers

Answer 1

Transifex is one such solution.

Answer 2

OneSky also offers free crowdsourced translation solutions for public project. It supports 30+ popular file formats (such as .strings, .xml, .resx, .resjson, .rrc, .yml, .yaml, .properties, .po, .pot).

There are some features that can improve the quality of collaborative translation process.

1. glossary system (to ensure consistency)
2. voting system (where users can vote for their favorite translation)
3. validation system (e.g. length limitation, placeholders validation)
4. screenshot function (websites often contain short phrases, e.g. buttons, that would be hard for users to understand the context if no screenshots are provided)
5. system to monitor users' contribution (e.g. recognize dedicated users & blacklist users who are purposely causing damage to the project) translation memory

Other than crowdsourced translation, you can also hire pros / manage your own in-house translators using OneSky platform, so you can easily use a mix of those methods (e.g. hire pros to translate urgent things that needs speed and open up for users to review afterwards).

Importing & downloading of files is easy. Simply upload your resource files to our cloud-based platform / hook up with our API to automate the process.

Disclaimer: I am an employee at OneSky

Answer 3

zanata is a nice web based translating platform.

Supported by RedHat, it a good choice for open source software.

And it's open source, so you can host it in your own company.

Answer 4

Lingumania is also free and has great support for crowdsourcing. What it does, it scans the pages you want to have translated and then let's your community translate directly from the copy of the web page itself. The nice thing is that while translating you are able to see how the page will look like (helps a lot when trying out different synonyms to fit inside a fixed width of a button).

Answer 5

Unlike other translation crowdsourcing websites, Ackuna.com is completely FREE. It supports the following string formats making developer's job easier:

1. Microsoft Excel (.xls)
2. Microsoft Office Open XML (.xlsx)
3. Android XML (.xml)
4. Ruby YAML (.yml)
5. Blackberry Resource (.rrc)
6. iOS Strings (.strings)
7. Java configuration (.properties)
8. Gnu Gettext Protable Object (.po)
9. Microsoft Word (.docx)
10. Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)
11. Text (.txt)

Answer 6

There are several projects in this direction with varying focus. Do you know http://globalvoicesonline.org/lingua/ for example?

Answer 7

The World Wide Lexicon Project may be what you're looking for. They publish a Firefox plugin for users to translate and correct machine translations of any site.

As a publisher, you can also request translations of your site. They also have an API.

Answer 8

http://www.SiteTran.com is a free translation system which would work well for utilizing your users (the crowd). And it is run as a service, so the installation is very simple. You install a single line of JavaScript. It also enables SEO friendly URLs. It's my project, by the way.