Does Q2A support automatic language translation?

Question

Is there automatic language translation support? For instance if a Russian user posts a question, can an English user read and respond? If so, what is the mechanism for that?

Answer 1

best method: detecting location using API and directing visitor to the correct subdomain(or TDL).

using translation APIs is a bad Idea, it's translation are not correct and most users will flee and it is bad from SEO point of view to have a single site with many languages spacialy with automatically created content.

Comments

We already do this with our support site where we have forums (using VBulletin). We use google translate and the results are much better than you seem to think. It works every bit as well as having a Russian user try to respond in English if their English is not so good.

If Q2A provides a way to intercept incoming requests and/or posts so they can be tagged, say with the user's locale or the locale info is already available, I am half way there. I just need to be able to plug into the input/output and if need be, first transform the data via google translate, replace the data in the stream and send it on its way.

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Well that's the curiosity and willing to know the mechanism behind language translation at the same moment. In many cases I have seen that your browser supports to translated a web page that is totally in different language but on the forums it is quite invisible and we don't have any support to change the language beside we use the language translation tool.
This is where the companies are growing in the field of language translations. I found Axis translations best of such works. However, it would be great if such nice mechanism is used online on the forums to read the msg easily to reply.

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We push the text of a post through google translate (a paid service). I did not write the code but I think we translate a post in a language once on demand and store the result in our database. That way at most we we only pay once per post per language.

We rely on the user that posts (they have to register) to register their native language so we know the "from" language. When someone goes to the forum, we use the locale pulled from the browser to "render" the correct translation in their browser. We have had cases where say a user posted in French but had registered English as their language. When an English browser looked at the post in the forum, they saw French. In such cases the forum entry had to be manually modified so the post language was changed to French.

It is impossible to dump out data and do a "manual" translation as per what I read in Q2A's documentation I found on this site. That works for a web page itself, but that is not what we call translation. That is internationalization and/or localization. For posts, there are just too many of them to do anything but an automatic translation.