allow comments and discussions to be translatable

Yes, I agree. Something like the translate option in Facebook. That feature would resolve a big issue that our group has been battling with since the beginning.

Wonderful suggestion @praveenarimbrathod. What languages have you got in your groups @rachelbwickert?

@richarddbartlett our "official" working languages are French and English but we have also Spanish, Dutch , Deutsch, Italian and Cantonese native speakers.

Wow this is a really cool idea. It could be a really nice plugin... or just a great feature to build right into Loomio. I want to dooo it!

i love this idea as well.
until someone in the community can build it, you might have to establish a group protocol for translating specific posts.

in case it help, if you want to link to a specific comment, you can right-click on the time-stamp of a comment and click copy-url, and then you have a way to reference a comment in the discussion

e.g. this link
https://www.loomio.org/d/2WiJqSN4/allow-comments-and-discussions-to-be-translatable#comment-73572

came from here:

oh wow, it looks like someone in the open source community is building what you've asked for. The first iteration will take us part the way to a solution. It would be awesome to get peoples feedback about how it is when it's rolled out.
we'l keep you posted

it's live! many thanks to @jameskiesel

go give it a whirl on some comments like the ones in here :
https://www.loomio.org/d/nrq3Dlg0/carta-das-organizacoes-da-sociedade-civil-ao-relator-do-marco-civil-da-internet

it's a first step towards a solution, so we'd love feedback on how people find it

Fastest turnaround on a feature request ever? Thank you @jameskiesel you rule!

@praveenarimbrathod this current solution works by detecting the preferred language of the viewer with the preferred language of the original commenter.

At the moment, logged preferences have to be one of the translated languages found in the language selector. This can be improved but will take some time

Amazing work @jameskiesel!

Here's a Portuguese-speaking group to test it on: Partido Pirata do Brasil.

@mixirving Thanks for the quick turn around! Currently I cannot test it because 'Malayalam' is not listed in the language selector. Also I couldn't access the link you shared.

@richarddbartlett thanks for this link, I can see the translate option! This is super cool! Though I still have to wait to do a real translation :(

@jameskiesel! The beauty of this feature is only outdone by that of its creator.

@praveenarimbrathod if you'd like to see translation of the app into Malayalam, feel free to help out
https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/loomio-1/language/ml/

let me know if you want help setting up.

unfortunately for automated comment translation, we need a service provider which allows calls to be translated from Malayalam.
At the moment we are using Bing Translator, and we have researched Google Translator too. Neither of these support Malayalam. Do you know of a service which does support translation?

@mixirving thanks for the transifex link, I started translating loomio to Malayalam. But I don't think it is a good idea to restrict comment translation only to languages where loomio itself is translated.

At the moment we don't have a good automatic translation service. We'll be happy to do manual translations for now, if that can be activated.

thanks for the feedback @praveenarimbrathod , rest assured we are building like crazy. I've just added the feature to our development backlog here : https://www.pivotaltracker.com/story/show/65435476

unless we have an outside contributor build this additional functionality. it might be a little time before we can get to it. In the meantime, you might have to add translations as separate comments.

I see you've already made a contribution to the Malayalam translation, that's awesome. please let me know if you have any questions about that process. If the translation gets to 40% we'll launch the language in experimental mode so you can see what your work looks like in app. Thanks for your awesome work

@mixirving we are already 40%! looking forward to using loomio in Malayalam and being able to translate comments in Malayalam!

amazing work on the translation!
@praveenarimbrathod, I sent you a message on Transifex, but for anyone else following along, you can check out the progress so far by visiting www.loomio.org/d/2WiJqSN4?locale=ml

if you want to change you language back, remember the language selector is at the bottom left of this page!

@mixirving now it just shows "translate to" without any language mentioned and when clicked, just stuck at "loading..." :( Thanks for activating Malayalam!

yeah I saw that! this is one of the reasons we haven't made Malayalam a language which is easy to select yet. The reason it says "Translating to" is that it looks on the list of select-able languages in the app, and Malayalam isn't one of them. A little bug.
The bigger issue is still that we have no automated way to get Malayalam translations. This means we'll have to disable this particular iteration till someone has time to build the ability for users to contribute a translation.
I'll talk to some people in the open source community. If you know of any Rails developers, we'd love more people helping out!

Hey, we liked this feature so much we wrote a blog post [deprecated] about it!

@praveenarimbrathod

@simontegg
I can't find that blog post anymore. :(

@balasankarchelamat We withdrew the feature temporarily because we weren't happy with it and had to withdraw the blog post as well. Now the blog is out of date...

I'd like to toss in my .02 here.

For two years I taught a group of multilingual students who had multilingual parents. YES! Furthermore, this is a great opportunity to train translation engines. Since that experience, I've always wanted (but lack some of the chops needed) to make multilingual forum software that allows the user to set the view-language and for users to specify which languages they have full fluency in.

Users fully fluent in the the original and target language could then make corrections to what the translation system did. I've been dtying for Google to make such a product, though their translation system now does cover, for example, (surprised cursing in Chinese) to WTF, which I've got to say is pretty impressive. Still, I think that there's a lot of room for improvement in translation, and systems like those discussed here have got to be one of the fastest ways to achieve those improvements.

@jacobgadikian that's pretty much how Loomio works right now, except without the ability to provide manual corrections to automatic translations. But it's a functional good start at least.

Alanna:

I noticed-- sorry my comment wasn't so much a "we should do" as a "Hot damn! Are doing! Awesome!"

Jacob GadikianE-mail: [email protected] ( [email protected] )
SKYPE: faddat
Phone/SMS: +86 186-2612-6079

Hahah great! My favorite type of comment!

Thanks for a quite informative discussion. Keep it up buddies! https://plus.google.com/+ShakoatHossain/