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mysociety
Consider translating notes on Home Office page into other languages
This is an interesting idea which might benefit our users who, unfortunately, use WDTK to make requests regarding their own personal circumstances.
My only concern is - how do we keep it up to date?
It is, of course, easy for us to use a service such as Google translate - but the quality of automatic translators/machine learning can still be a little 'ropey', so I think we'd probably want someone to look things over… just in case we are accidentally misleading people.
@zarino is there something we can learn from FixMyBlock here? How does the translation there work?
@crowbot We investigated human translation on FixMyBlock but decided against it, because we had too many languages of equal "importance" (meaning it wasn’t obvious which languages should get human translation, and which could be left to automated translation) and there was a fear that, as new pages got added to the site, we’d be fighting a losing battle to get them all translated in time and on budget.
So we ended up adding a pre-made WordPress widget that lets users translate a page using the Google Translate API. The translations might not be ideal, but we figured it was an acceptable balance of quality and convenience, for both us and the users.
I’m not sure your use case is the same. It sounds like you have just a small amount of text that needs translating, and it’s quite important that it’s translated properly. I can see why @mdeuk suggests human translation, or at least, human checking after automated translation. Tricky!
WDTK is a pretty well known resource. I wonder whether you could identify (from user support?) the languages most commonly used in erroneous requests to the Home Office, and put up a public message asking for volunteers to help translate a short passage, pro bono?
