AT-LARGE GATEWAY
At-Large Regional Policy Engagement Program (ARPEP)
At-Large Review Implementation Plan Development
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Testing of new translation tool for LACRALO mailing lists
ICANN Staff has have created two mailing lists (New-transbot-en and New-transbot-es) to test the new translation tool with a select number of persons on those lists for testing the systempurposes.
Some of the key changes implemented in the new translation tool.
- The lack of punctuation was identified as a key issue for the poor translation of emails. This is because the translate tool can only send a certain amount of characters to the Google Translate API. Without punctation, the translation tool would have to send text mid setence. One of the outcomes from the LACRALO translation WG was the Proposed Notice when email is not translated message which would be sent to the user if the email had formatting issues.
- Subject lines would not be translated to ensure the conversation thread would not be lost and reduce the chance of garbled subject lines.
Below are some of the bug reports/observations noted from testing the new translation toolduring testing
| Date Added | Description | Status | Additional Notes | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 27 2014 | Emails sent to new-transbot-en resulted in a "Sentence punctuation must be followed by a space" error message |
| "The Sentence punctuation error I believe was being caused by the footer being added to the list which is normally removed." | |||||||
| Dec 11 2014 | Periods aren't used when a URL is cited at the end (or on its own line) since that would make it a different URL. However, this would result in the "Sentence punctuation must be followed by a space" method | |||||||||
| Dec 12 2014 | parser unable to handle HTML formatted emails with URLs - URLs are missing from translation. See http://mm.icann.org/transbot2_archive/efc07cecca.html ; many emails from ALAC_announce are using HTML formatted emails |
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Some of the changes in the new translation tool.
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History
- The LACRALO list in English: http://atlarge-lists.icann.org/pipermail/lac-discuss-en/ and LACRALO list in Spanish: http://atlarge-lists.icann.org/pipermail/lac-discuss-es/ were machine translated around September 2008. The translation engine was based on Systran.
- The quality of translation left a lot to be desired in terms of the language translation. Also, there were technical issues such as the subject lines of translated emails becoming garbled.
- During the LACRALO meeting in Cartagena in 2010, there were intense discussions regarding the quality of mailing list translations. Some wanted to disable the translation entirely. Others wanted to keep the imperfect translation for mobile users and disabling translation would send the wrong signal to ICANN when ICANN should be giving language services a higher priority. ICANN staff acknowledged the issues and stressed that IT staff were aware of the issues and would be looking to solve the translation problems.
- Around May 2011, the translation engine was switched from Systran to Google Translate.
- in May 2011, Google announced that it would be depreciating the (then) free Google Translate API (http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/05/spring-cleaning-for-some-of-our-apis.html) in a few months but later (due to public outcry) announced that a paid version of the translate API would be offered.
- Other issues noted around June 2011 were identified, one was the translation engine would stop translating emails when they became too big. This meant that a conversation thread would stop being translated leading to missing emails from one list not being translated to the other list. See http://atlarge-lists.icann.org/pipermail/lac-discuss-en/2011/004308.html for the solution to this (translation tool would stop translating quoted text)
- Around August 2011, the translation engine was switched back to Systran due to Google rejecting calls to the Google Translate API. See http://atlarge-lists.icann.org/pipermail/lac-discuss-en/2011/004368.html
- Updarte to the translation engine: September 2011, http://atlarge-lists.icann.org/pipermail/lac-discuss-en/2011/004498.html
- June 2012, detailed analysis of translation issues (see below)
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