Making WordPress.org

Opened 7 years ago

Last modified 3 years ago

#3014 new enhancement

Plugins: Translate all plugin readmes with Google Translate

Reported by: gibrown's profile gibrown Owned by:
Milestone: Improved Search Priority: normal
Component: Translate Site & Plugins Keywords:
Cc:

Description

In the course of looking at building an neural machine translation (NMT) system for WordPress strings, I also evaluated Google Translate. The NMT version of Google Translate does a much better job of translating HTML and special characters. It still will not be at all perfect, but I think it would be worth experimenting with translating the readmes for all plugins for a few languages.

The problem we can solve: Search is pretty terrible in most non-English languages because most plugins don't have translations. Even though the search is terrible, about 20% of all searches occur in non-English langs: https://make.wordpress.org/meta/2016/08/30/initial-analysis-of-plugin-search-logs/

Evaluation of Google Translate: https://github.com/Automattic/wp-translate#translating-with-google-translate-api

Our search mostly only cares about what individual words are in the README. Even if the translation is not good enough for an end user, just by having a translation to the user's language we should be able to provide much better search results.

When the user reaches the plugin's page we could either:
1) show them what we have as our best guess at a translation (maybe a native Spanish speaker can comment on what they think of these errors for the Jetpack README translations: https://github.com/Automattic/wp-translate/blob/master/gt-translated/wp-plugins-jetpack-stable-readme-es.diff)
2) or we could just show them the English version and count on them to use an in page Google Translate or similar feature.

Either way, the ability of non-English users to search for plugins in their own language seems like it would be a win. Maybe having search results could even drive users to translating the plugin READMEs. In cases where the plugin was auto translated we add some UI to indicate that, and can direct users to glotpress for fixing the translations.

I'm not positive how well this would work, but I think it may be worth trying.

Change History (5)

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #polyglots by sergey. View the logs.


7 years ago

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #polyglots by casiepa. View the logs.


7 years ago

#3 @fmarzocca
7 years ago

I have very bad experiences in automatic translation from English to Italian with Google Translate. Lots of laughs! Sometimes it writes very funny sentences.

I think it is better to deafult to english and let's wait for some Translator in the original language. Best Guess is often not the Best Choice. IMHO.

Last edited 7 years ago by fmarzocca (previous) (diff)

#4 @gibrown
7 years ago

OK, that's good feedback for choosing option 2 above, thanks!

Just to clarify, translating for search would just mean that you can search in both English and the other language. We just boost results that match the translation when the plugin readme has been translated. For the case of search, the actual wording doesn't matter that much, just whether or not individual words are present.

#5 @gibrown
3 years ago

  • Milestone changed from Plugin Directory v3 - Future to Improved Search
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