[sldev] Autotranslation build to try out

[Jo Grant]

Jim Oser writes:
>I want to type in English and have my friends, see the German.
It's very tempting, but it breaks one of the "golden rules" of Machine 
Translation: you *never* translate outgoing text, only incoming text.
MT is "pull" technology, not "push" technology. It should always be invoke 
by the reader, not the writer. Quite simply: if you do not speak the 
target language, you do not know what you are saying. There are many 
humorous stories of MT driven misunderstandings. Quite often, as well, the 
listener will speak the source language better than MT speaks the target 
language.

Lawson English wrote:
>Gack my suggestion for "any" url merely compounds the issue you bring 
>up.
I normally deal in a business context with business sensitive information. 
Obviously that's not 100% applicable to Second Life. I mainly wanted to 
raise people's awareness. It's an easy thing to forget. 
I think there are ways this could be done. At a base level, the users 
themselves are responsible for ensuring that they adhere to the ToS. If 
the default service provided was secure, than it's a fair feature to add. 
(Google probably have a clause somewhere that specifies they record only 
the linguistic pattern of what is submitted, and not the actual 
identifiable data, or something like that.) And an extension to add in 
your own translation service is also OK when coupled with static text or a 
prompt warning them to make sure the service they use doesn't do anything 
with the data. Basically you shift the responsibility from the software 
provider to the user. 
I think it would get past most reasonable legal departments. 

Cheers,

Jo


***************************************
Jo Grant, jo_grant at us.ibm.com
http://www-03.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/roivw
ISV Developer Enablement Architect, 
Notes 8 Composite Applications and XPages,
One Roger's Street, Cambridge MA 02144
tel: 617-693-6089
SL: Jaymin Carthage

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