[Foundation-l] Push translation

Mark Williamson node.ue at gmail.com
Thu Jul 29 01:52:07 UTC 2010


Google is, in my experience, very difficult for "regular" people to
get in touch with. Sometimes, when a product is in beta, they give you
a way to contact them. They used to have an e-mail to contact them at
if you had information about bilingual corpora (I found one online
from the Nunavut parliament for English and Inuktitut, but now it
looks like they've removed the address) so they could use it to
improve Google Translate.

I think they intentionally have a relatively small support staff. I
read somewhere that that had turned out to be a huge problem for the
mobile phone they produced - people might not expect great support for
a huge website like Google, but when they buy electronics, they
certainly do expect to have someone they can call and talk to within
24 hours.

I don't think that's completely unwise, though. I'm sure they get tons
of crackpot e-mails all the time. I was reading an official blog about
Google Translate, and in the post about their Wikipedia contests,
someone wrote an angry comment that google "must hate Spain" because
the Spanish language wasn't mentioned in that particular post. Now
multiply that by millions, and that is part of the reason (or so I
imagine) that Google makes it difficult to contact them.

-m.

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 9:14 AM, Amir E. Aharoni
<amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> Is anyone from Google reading this thread?
>
> Because of this thread i tried to play with the Google Translator Toolkit a
> little and found some technical problems. When i tried to send bug reports
> about them through the "Contact us" form, i received after a few minutes a
> "bounce" message from the translation-editor-support at google.com address.
>
> I love reporting bugs, and developers are supposed to love reading them, but
> it looks like i'm stuck here...
>
> 2010/7/27 Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com>
>
>> Aphaia, Shiju Alex and I are referring to Google Translator Toolkit,
>> not Google Translate. If the person using the Toolkit uses it as it
>> was _meant_ to be used, the results should be as good as a human
>> translation because they've been reviewed and corrected by a human.
>>
>> --
> אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> Amir Elisha Aharoni
>
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
>
> "We're living in pieces,
>  I want to live in peace." - T. Moore
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>



More information about the foundation-l mailing list