New Crowdsourced Engine Aids Site Translation
Geni, home to the world’s largest family tree, has open-sourced their tr8n crowdsourced translation engine. Tr8n was originally developed by Geni to translate their own site. When Geni gave a few dozen users access to the translation tools, they translated the entire site into seventeen languages in less than two weeks, submitting over 15,000 translations. Geni decided to open source the engine so other sites can take advantage of the technology.
Tr8n is a Rails engine for crowdsourcing translation. Translators can vote on existing translations, or submit their own inline while browsing the site. The tr8n engine takes into account the grammar rules of each language to provide accurate translations for any context such as the viewing user’s gender and number ranges. Developers can extend tr8n by defining their own rules.
The tr8n engine is a complete translation solution with:
- Built-in support for over 250 languages
- Full support for right-to-left languages
- Translation statistics, rankings, and dashboard
- Management tools for extensive customization
- Discussions for translators
This solution is superior to the default Rails translation framework,” said Amos Elliston, CTO of Geni. “Crowdsourcing your translations means you no longer have to hire expert translators, and your site is quickly and painlessly translated by users in real-time. As your site evolves, new text is translated almost immediately, without the traditional bottleneck you find with paid translators.”
The advantages of tr8n over other popular crowdsourced translation solutions, such as Facebook’s Translation for Facebook Connect, include:
- User experience – users are not required to have an account on another site
- Data Ownership – site operators own their translations
- Powerful – more flexible syntax and context rules for translating complex phrases
- Performance – translations occur at render time rather than after page loads
The tr8n engine can be seen in action at www.geni.com and at www.yammer.com. Developers interested in more information can read the documentation and download the source code here.
Reader Comments
Tr8n is a great software! This can definitely save a lot of time and money and must have been extremely useful and beneficial for all users. Amazing programs!
Posted by Joey on July 11, 2012
"Developers can extend tr8n by defining their own rules"
This is great for developers who wants to build translation into their sites. This way you get better grammar (hopefully) on the sites.
Posted by Jerry on August 11, 2011
This new site translation will surely provide a lot of users benefits that they can use with their work. With the help of this site translation, I am aware that everything will work well and I think this will serve as a good source of information to each and everyone who are planning to use it.
Posted by Raluca Stone on July 13, 2011
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