Translations

[The Purple Panzer]

At least one of my servers has lots of European players; while I know a few languages, I certainly don't know all that I would need to understand everyone. It'd be nice to tie in some (free, available) web services to do translation.

One possible problem is language identification (though players could have an associated language). Several of my admins speak several languages, so they may be sending out messages in any of a number of tongues; it'd be nice to detect German, Romanian, Italian, Spanish, etc. somewhat automatically (this could be as simple as keyword identification). Then, a call out to a web service such as Babelfish, or any of a number of similar translators, could return the message in my preferred language (English), or of course in anyone's preferred language.

Translations don't have to be perfect; but I think machine translation would be quite good, given the simple message phrases (e.g., "Where's that ST got to?", "I have to go now, be back in an hour", "What key do I use to show scores?", etc.). It isn't literature, and even if some of it is (the humor, sometimes), even a rough translation will convey the general topic.

While it sounds like I'm suggesting this just for my convenience, that's not it, really; I think opening up the game to nearly seamless access for speakers of a variety of languages would expand the user community, and make it more fun for all concerned.

[joevano]

The issue is finding a translation service that has a friendly "Terms of Service". The terms of service on translation services generally require a button on a website with no modification of the graphics or code displayed. In other words the user needs to see who is providing the translation service exactly as the translation service wants with no modification. If you want to use it in some other way it needs to be licensed. There have been proof of concept plugins written against both Babel Fish and Google translate, but the terms of service of those services make them unusable.

[blast]

Technically the TOS of Google could work. It would depend if someone worked out a special agreement.

1.2 Unless otherwise agreed in writing with Google, your agreement with Google will always include, at a minimum, the terms and conditions set out in this document. These are referred to below as the “Universal Terms”.

.....

5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers) and shall ensure that you comply with the instructions set out in any robots.txt file present on the Services.

Likely wouldn't happen, but I don't think anyone has asked either.

There is also an AJAX Google Translate API that might be possible to use. I think someone just needs to do more digging to see what is out there and contact a few providers to see what can be done.