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Network Multilingual Support
Goal
The purpose of multilingual support is to provide citizens with the ability to experience Nation1 in their preferred language, and to communicate with other citizens in a language they are familiar with. The ultimate, currently technically unrealistic goal, is for a citizen in England to be e-mailing/chatting to a friend in France, one conversing in English, the other in French -- but both texts being automatically and perfectly translated so that to each user, the other appears to speak the same language fluently. The goal of the sytem is to provide the "best" available language to all users, acknowledging that perhaps a majority of users will speak more than one language to varying degrees of fluency.
Acknowledging there are constraints regarding the quality of machine translations, Nation1 still believes MT is a valuable tool to be used in conjuction with other methods, ie. human translation or a combination of MT and human editing.
The Network Interface
The Network interface, as with all key elements of Nation1, will be available in a range of languages in addition to English. Language preferences (in order: for instance a citizen might note that they speak native french, are fluent in Italian, and can speak a little English) will be specified within the citizen profile area of the Citizenship key element upon registration, and the entire Nation1 site, including Network, will adjust accordingly. For instance, our French citizen might find a particular area of the Network site unavailable in French, but available in Italian, while another area of the site might be available only in English. The system will always try and find the "best" language option available for the user, based on a rating system for each page (native language would score a perfect rating, human professional translators would score a high rating, unprofessional human translators a mid-rating, machine translation a low rating, and no translation available a zero rating). If NO options are available, the particular component will not be shown or promoted to the citizen - from the moment the citizen logs into Nation1.
Citizens with proven translation skills (having translated a number of other documents within Nation1) will be able to translate an interface from one language to another, or further refine existing interface translations. This will be done relatively simply, through a form based process where each interface label, or passage of text is provided along with a short explanation of the context and purpose of the passage, accompanied by a form-field in which a translation can be typed.
While this requires extra effort by translators as well as the initial coders, to provide a short description where necessery of context, this will act as a measure of quality control and dramatically assist in the production of context-correct translations. Each translated interface will be distributed to at least one other translator for editing, before being added to the available language options.
Every page within Nation1 will have the language of the page noted at the top of the page. If a single page contains a number of different languages (to be avoided, unless a citizen nominates their skill level as "native" in more than one language) both languages will be noted. Languages will also be provided with a colour-code which can be displayed in a symbol next to a link to indicate the native/available language(s) of the linked page.
Translation of live content
Live content refers to all content that is not an interface. For instance within Network this would include: Discussion posts, discussion summaries and online chats.
As with interfaces, the best available language option will appear. A users level of language proficiency will be evaluated against the rating of a language option. For instance, if a particular post was initially in French, and the citizen speaks native English and is almost fluent with French, the post may be provided to the citizen in French. On the other hand, if the citizen spoke only a little French, the post would be translated into English using MT. Even though the MT may not be perfect, the system judges the translation to be better than what the citizen could have managed using their own French skills. To assist in determining where to draw the line between MT and the native French, citizens will be asked to TRY the native French a number of times and rate their ability to understand it. In all cases, a citizen will be able to override the system's judgement with a "Change Language" button which appears at the top of the page. A citizen can also permanently override the computer's judgement and select exactly when languages should be displayed and when they should not. If a citizen wishes, two languages - the initial language, and the translated language (or indeed, two translations) can be displayed on a page, one below the other, each in their distinct colours. Not only is this to assist immediate comprehension, but also to promote language learning.
Also, as with Interfaces, citizens will be able to provide a human translation of Content which will systematically be given a higher "quality rating" than translation by machine. Citizens will be able to choose content to translate (which would be once again done in a simple form based process). Further, high-trafficked content will be placed in a queue for translation, with translators picking up the work on a first-come, first-served but also quality checked basis.
In the case of Content, a second-translator would not be required to check the translation, however they would be free to challenge the "high" quality rating that has been given to the translation, and offer another/improve upon the existing translation.
Technical implementation
Translation into all available MT/Human options for highly-trafficked content will occur in off-peak server periods. Less highly-trafficked content, and real-time chat translations will be translated into required languages when need arises (obviously immediately, in the case of real-time-chat).