Cucumis and Socialbel, translation by humans

I remember having posted here some of my thoughts on automatic translation (great efforts but still *not there*).

I stumbled across (sorry, I can’t remember exactly who shared them, I failed to bookmark the source this time) these two sites which offer us he possibility to join a sort of peer-to-peer translation community, an approach based on the economy of gift or sharing.

Cucumis:

1. You need to register to translate and to get texts translated.
2. Quote from Wikipedia (too lazy, rather, too little time to paraphrase): All new members are given enough points to “pay” for translation of a short paragraph. Returning members who lack points are given more points. Members earn points by translating texts submitted by others. All members may translate texts and edit translations by others. For quality control, all translations are rated by administrators and experts. All members are eligible for promotion to “Expert” for a given language after completing many translations into that language rated with an average quality of over 7/10. Ok, so basically when you enter a text to be translated, you get some points deducted. You can earn them back by translating some other person’s request into your mother tongue.

What I like:

• The whole idea of peer-to-peer translation.
• That it’s not business-driven, it’s just an organic community based upon the motto of exchanging favors.
• That translations can get rated.
• That users can earn an expert status.

What I don’t like:

• Design (at all). Eye candy is just added value, my friends, and a plus on user-friendliness.
• I couldn’t find any requested translation from ENG>SPA / SPA>ENG…Weird!?

Socialbel: (via Twine “Crowdsourcing”)

1. It’s community-driven.
2. The focus is not on texts but on terms and short expressions or collocations (you can also user WordReference forums for this, but the interface is probably more user-friendly at Socialbel). Once you register, you can create a new “Term” containing a word/a couple of words:

3. You choose the language you want that term to be translated into. If no results show up, then click Proceed.

4. You can add some description about the expression and then click on Create.

5. You can add your own translation, or wait for someone else to do that. In the meantime you can also check if you can help others on their expressions.

What I don’t like:

• The search option falls just too short: There’s no way to search by languages, by requested translations (something you can do at Cucumis, by the way). It could be great if people could add tags to their expressions/words in order to be able to search translated expressions by topics/keywords.

So take these places into account whenever you need to have some text translated.

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