Translating news

[Trociu]

I see you have add translator to the news. Great idea, but wouldn't it be better to allow us to translate them? Maybe not everyone, but only people who have proven their skill - those who are on this site for a few months and can translate validated lines? I know you don't want to make it possible to edit like rules on your wikia, but maybe more like strings in games, with exception that news would be validated from the beggining so not everyone could translate them. I'm not a programmer but I think it's not too hard to implement.

I'm asking because translating things by computer to fusional languages like mine (polish) looks just horrible. Not everything is easy or even possible to understand, rest looks like written by someone really retarded, and it really would be better to leave it in english than use Microsoft Translator (in my opinion).

[Een]

Machine translation sure is not perfect, but being statistically based, it should improve over time (but it's true that it may depend on the language, translation is a hard problem to tackle).

This feature is meant:
- for people that don't have a good mastery of English, so that they can follow up on BGA news more easily (even if the translation is not so good, it conveys the general meaning)
- for people that prefer to have a linguistically homogeneous page, smoother on the eyes, and that will click on the 'show original text' when they want to read the news in English (if the translation is not good enough for them).

From some other feedback, I understand that there is a 3rd category of people, who have full mastery of English and don't mind a linguistically heterogeneous page, and would like better the news in English by default over an imperfect translation with the need to click to see the original text.

So in the next version, I'll add a user preference to display the English text by default, with the possibility of clicking a 'translate' link to see the machine translation.

We could also expand the system to enable community improvements to the default machine translation (same as what you propose, but with something to start with). But that will require some more work (it's not as simple as it looks), so it will take some time (if it can be made to work at all, not quite sure at this time).

Cheers,
Een