A few days ago, Hajas Tamás was kind enough to read my post about Making a Social Music Site in Drupal and mention it on his blog. The catch is that, two years of college Spanish notwithstanding, I am uni-language; if it ain’t in English, I got nothing. I recognize exactly three words in the post: Rifflet, guitar and Drupal. So how do I read what he/she wrote?
Google Translator
According to Google, .hu domain names are registered to Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. I went over to Google Translate, which I thought would be the best bet, but I’m still missing a crucial piece of information: I have no idea what language this is in. I tried with no luck choosing the ‘Romanian’ or ‘Bulgarian’ options. There was a ‘Detect Language’ option (hidden) at the top of the list, which revealed that the page is written in Hungarian, but I got the error message “We are not yet able to translate from Hungarian into English.” Fair enough.
I Googled “Hungarian to English webpage translator” and found Webforditas.hu, which did exactly what I want, but the results were less than stellar:
Me getting to the title page is due for this. I wrote to them Rifflet.com -ról, which Piköphöz is similarly, Drupalra is being built and affords the opportunity to the submission of musical ideas. Aries was in such a way with him though that he should be able to make this. And he had truth. It wrote an article about an idea (refers to me in this), and accomplished the application under some days (see it on the title page the newest riffletek shorts!).
Um, Yeah.
I think it’s safe to assume that online translation may be one of the final frontiers in web design. Not everything is gonna translate perfectly, but come on–that just sucked.
Here’s an interesting statistic: Of the top 20 countries with the most Internet users, the three with the biggest increase in users over the last eight years are Pakistan, Vietnam and Iran, each of whom has around a 10,000% (seriously) increase in users between 2000 and 2008. I would imagine a few of these folks will be making some websites, or at the very lest, blogging, making Facebook accounts or uploading some photos.
The Next Step
Obviously, translation apps are not where they need to be. Or maybe, FREE translation apps are not where they need to be. In that case, this seems like a job for the open-source community. Where else are you going to find thousands of testers and programmers, all willing to work for very little other than the knowledge that they’re helping lots of people, and who already speak hundreds of different languages?
Drupal, an open-source CMS, has been working on the problem for some time. Drupal allows sites to install multiple languages, but these, for the most part, are predifined terms and not on-the-fly translations, like we really need.
So, got any good ways to translate from Hungarian to English? Lemme know. If I get an actual translation, I’ll post it.
Check out babelfish.yahoo.com. I’ve found it to be better than Google Translate on a lot of pages.
You might see if a Drupal community member is willing to help out in this regard. We have numerous english speaking Hungarians in our community, chx and Gabor just to name a couple of which there are MANY.
why not just ask thamas about the article?
Thanks for commenting! I did check out Babelfish, although it doesn’t seem like they have support for Hungarian to English translations at this time.
Thanks for the Drupal suggestion–I will head to the boards over there.
@gergely-I think you may have hit on the simplest (and best) solution of all!
Human language is subtle, complex and beautiful. With problems of idiom, frame of cultural reference, generational differentiation, not to mention plays-on-words, and other entire categories of humor/rhyme/meter that are literally untranslatable even manual, “human” translation is a great skill that requires much patience and practice to get right. The better you speak any given pair of languages, the harder it is to translate between them since you begin to understand the deeper, hidden layers of meaning in anything you hear or read (see factors above). Machine translation, whether open-source or not is years/decades/infinitely far away from being usable.
Hey, one of the things I got for my birthday was an English idioms learners book, since I was whining I sometimes don’t understand the subtle details of conversations with native English speakers. I could stand behind jam’s note that human language is hard. And they say Hungarian is not among the easier ones even
Something like this:
Piköp - a new site for guitarist. And I’m on the frontpage’
Well after the hyped title, here come the facts: The Piköp (for English guys, it’s a mispronunciation of the pick-up, one of the main part of the electric guitars) a newcomer news site for musicians - especially but not limited to - guitarists. (It’s not only a news site, read it later.) The contents maintained by HZ and Aries - the last one is regulary disturbed by me ;o)
This is the reason why I came onto the frontpage. I wrote him about the Rifflet.com, a site what based on Drupal too and that one helps to public unfinished musics. Aries tought that he’s able to do it. And he was right. He wrote an article (reflects to me) and after some days he did he’s version (see the “latest rifflets” (”legújabb riffletek” in Hungarian) line!)
Anything else? Videos, reviews of instruments, interesting news, guitar tabs (Guitar Drupal modul), forum, second hand shop, polls. The main secions are: Guitar, Bass, Drums and percussions, Keyboards, Effects, Studio, Live sound.
(Note: the rifflet function is not polished, but i’m on it. The sync between the storage server and the web frontend is ready (little hack in the file handling of the audio module), if you mind, try it, but it’s in very early stage of development.) Feedbacks, welcome!
I’m really sorry that you had trouble with my blog. But I think next time you will know what to do: just ask the author. English is widly used in the world and you will have a good chance to be understanded.
But there is an other thing I’ve learned from this story: I should write at least a short info about me my blog in English. I will do, I promise! ;o)
@Aries-Thank you for the translation! And great site by the way.
Personally, I’m looking forward to the days when we can all wear those beltpacks that translate our language on the fly, like Baby Translator on the Simpsons, or more recently, Stephen Colbert’s financial advisor, Gorlock.
Why don’t you check on our site? English to Japanese only though.