Show HN: I built a wiki-style site for language learning and text translation

http://macaronics.com/articles/showhnwiki

by dpapathanasiou • 14 years ago

3 5 14 years ago

It started as a hobby, to automatically send myself short study emails once a day, but then I thought to open it up to anyone.

It's still very much a work in progress, but I'd love to find out what people here think!

goldfeld• 14 years ago

Very cool! This is something I was always looking for when I was studying Chinese--recommended texts to read, based on my ability, and with mouseover translations by word/sentence. Now that I'm about to get into German, I'll keep this on my radar.

Are you planning to integrate with dictionaries for placeholders, and let users modify/improve what's most critical?

dpapathanasiou3• 14 years ago

I actually started by machine-translating everything, but I think the sparseness of the articles is better b/c it feels like a call to action to complete them, versus already having the English or Japanese in place.

Also, the default MT was terrible, and in many cases, the sentences made no sense.

WRT German, I'd love to do it, it's just I don't know which articles from which sites I should pick to use.

kevin_p• 14 years ago

I like the way the translations are at a sentence-by-sentence level. I think it makes you more of a language learning tool, rather than a social translation site like Yeeyan where the major goal is just making a translation of the whole article.

Being able to show the whole translation history of a sentence as soon as you click on it is also a good idea (is that what you're doing? I didn't notice any sentences with more than one previous translation, so I can't confirm it).

Here are some changes I would make if it was my site (just some ideas, they might not be particularly good):

* A bilingual/comparison mode, like Yeeyan's 左右对照 view, so you can see both the original and the translated articles at the same time

* Default to the latest translation when you click 'translate' on a sentence that's already been translated, instead of a blank textbox (I think most changes will be relatively minor corrections rather than re-translating the sentence from scratch)

* Continue to show the edit history of a sentence even when you've clicked 'translate'; also have a way to copy an old translation to the translation textbox for editing (just click on it?)

* Edit summaries for translations (optional, of course), so you can see why the translator thinks the new translation is an improvement over the old one

Also, I haven't really studied Japanese much so I might be wrong about this, but might it be better to show the kana as ruby instead of as a big long string below the sentence? That way it's easier to know what pronunciation maps to what word. Or perhaps highlight the appropriate kana when you mouseover a word. And is it normal to convert katakana to hiragana in that section, that seems a bit weird to me.

I created an account, but my Japanese isn't good enough to take part in this sort of project. I'll definitely be interested when you launch the Chinese version.

dpapathanasiou3• 14 years ago

Thanks!

Also, thanks for mentioning Yeeyan; I hadn't heard of it, and I'll check it out.

WRT multiple translations, the current plan is to show the 'best' single edit, rather than aggregating a series of prior edits (though anyone who wants to submit an alternative translation can just make minor edits of any of the prior ones, of course).

But to see if that or any of the other suggestions you've made would work, I need to get more contributors to the site.

You're right about the furigana; it would make more sense as a hover/click to the corresponding word.

As for adding Chinese, I would love to do it.

Whenever I add a language, I'd like to include an interesting source of articles which is not readily available in other languages (i.e., an intelligent or thought-provoking magazine which publishes only in Chinese).

If you have a list of sites which fit that criteria, let me know, and I can add them, as well as making Chinese an option in the translate to/from list.

Show HN: I built a wiki-style site for language learning and text translation

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