Translator adjustments - is it possible to improve the translation

Our Baltic Sea Region network is using the Howspace in multiple co-learning and open innovation processes. On first trials, we have found that the translator is missing Latvian language. Is it going to be added soon?

Also, we got complaints about the quality of the Polish translation (from English to Polish). 

In our network, Howspace is used e.g. for participant surveys for different groups involved in the open innovation process. To ensure that the participants understand questions correctly, it would be great if the translation could be improved manually to avoid misunderstanding in the answers and finally in the research results. Because we have many nationalities involved, some language translations from English might work well and some need improvement. If we can only change the original English version, it becomes difficult to address the issues in specific language translation without interfering with the other translations.

Hi Anna

Thanks for your feedback and ideas. We have added support for Latvian language.

We have been talking about adding editor to manually tweak automatic translations. No final decisions yet about that.

Also great idea from customer is possibility to have some terms that will not be translated, or will always be translated in certain way. This is especially helpful for different names. You could say:

Howspace => Howspace
Palloliitto => Football Association

etc..

Thanks to Anna and Antti. 

I have a similar challenge with translations. The core of using a workspace is to provide a safe environment where one can learn and collaborate. Uncertainty in understanding can shift focus away from the main topic.

Very often, field-specific content contains terms that are clearly not translated (such as the names of organizations or titles) or are always translated in a specific way (e.g., 'project' = projekti, not hanke; 'jury' = tuomaristo, not court). Even being able to 'lock in' the meaning of a term in English (to then use it for translations into other languages) would already help significantly.

In addition. A participant can choose their preferred language in the workspace. Is it possible to send messages so that the text follows the participant’s language selection? The individual variables related to messaging are always retrieved from the respective workspace.

Can you open the last idea a bit more?

For example if there are 100 participants in a workspace and they are using 10 different languages. How would you like to send emails to them? With variables you are referencing to these [WORKSPACE_NAME] variables, right?

Thanks for asking :) I was thinking of a regular email sent from the workspace (e.g., 'welcome to today's meeting...', 'a new module has opened', etc.), where the recipient would receive the message in the language they have selected in the workspace. It's already possible to personalize the messages (e.g., using the recipient's name) and, of course, their email address. Does this clarify my question at all?

This might be super tricky, since often emails are sent to multiple users at the same time. 

Hi all! 

Seconding what others have said here. The AI translation is a good tool, but insufficient as it is now. We would greatly appreciate and it would save us countless hours of work in the future if

• the translations could be edited
• you could translate the entire course/workspace and make the translation into a new workspace that is now fully in that language (now we have to copy the workspace into a new workspace, copy the translations off the original into the new one while editing them)
• you could upload your own termbase/termlist and if the AI would learn off of the edits you make.

As it stands at the moment the AI translator can't handle our terminology and makes grave errors that we have no control over. We need workspaces with hardcoded translations. The AI is also very inconsistent with its translations of terms and words. But to start with, possibility to edit and make the targer into the source language would help greatly!

Another improvement that could be considered is to add the translation feature to a widget. In bilingual communities it would be beneficial to have the possibility to create content in one language and have beside the same text in the other required language. This would save time of the creator and lower the skill/language knowledge requirement of the maker. Of course at this point It would be used only for "general" content but the translators are improving fast... 🙂