It’s been a busy month and a half since I last posted here on the Kontrib blog so I apologize for the lack of news. As many of you already noticed, we updated the look and feel of Kontrib back in June. Officially, this is version 1.2 of Kontrib and some of the new features include the following:

• New look and feel to the website
• Tag stories with keywords
• Integration with Yahoo!’s Flickr service. This is perhaps the coolest little mashup we threw together thus far. When you’re “kontributing” a story to Kontrib, you can now search for pictures within Flickr’s repository of digital images. Picture selections are determined by the tags that you enter for the story.
• We reorganized the home page to show the “Top Stories” first, followed by “New Stories”
• You can upload your own user avatar
• You can search content by your friends name or their email addresses if you know it

Most of the changes were below the hood where we optimized code and fixed numerous bugs from the previous 1.1 version.

But wait! That wasn’t all that happened in June! Later in the month we rolled out support for Romanian to English and English to Romanian translation systems. That’s right - you can now submit content originating in Romanian and have Kontrib automatically translate the content into English. We are working to add in the other languages as target output.

Finally at the end of June, we introduced Simplified Chinese to the Kontrib community with support for Simplified Chinese into English and English into Simplified Chinese. We are also looking into rolling out support for Traditional Chinese.

Since we’re on the topic of languages - what languages would you like to see us support here at Kontrib? There are some obvious additions down the road but we’d love to hear from all of you!

This summer has been an exciting one thus far for Kontrib and we hope all of you are enjoying the changes and additions being made to the website. Feel free to share Kontrib with all of your friends!! Thanks and have a wonderful day!

-Kontrib Staff

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For those of you that might have missed this a few weeks back, Language Weaver announced version 4.3 of their Statistical Machine Translation Software (SMTS). The new version provides “better functionality for translators, localization service providers and IT administrators of the translation workflow process. In addition, the company is introducing an expanded list of Asian languages, including Korean and traditional Chinese, with Japanese soon to follow.”

How does this affect Kontrib? Kontrib will soon completely transition to version 4.3 of the SMTS product line. Translations for Arabic to English and English to Arabic are already using version 4.3. Additional language support for version 4.3 will be introduced to Kontrib over time.

You can find additional information about version 4.3 of the Language Weaver Statistical Machine Translation Software here on the Language Weaver website.

[Check it out]

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Jennifer Maderazo of MediaShift published an excellent article a few weeks back entitled “Community-Edited News Sites Abound in Other Languages”. You can find the article on the PBS.org website here. The central point of this article is on how community-edited news sites have gone beyond the English language and into several other languages such as Spanish and French. Of course then you have a site such as ours where the goal is to be multilingual from the get go - where people can openly share and discuss content in a variety of languages. The key notion to take away from all of this - the Internet is becoming more and more multilingual every day.

[Check it out]

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CenterNetworks has published a great video review of Kontrib here on their website.  Here’s a quote from the blog posting:

Here is my concern. If you are going to enter a market that is already pretty top-heavy, you better bring your A game. I like the idea of translations and I think it is something not done enough overall, but the interface is lacking. While I can’t say I love Digg or Netscape for their usability and design, they are several notches above Kontrib. My recommendation for Kontrib is to really beef up the user experience to awesome, then they might be on to something. Also, the translations are not featured enough. First load of the page, I don’t get that the translations are offered.

The video review had some awesome suggestions and feedback. We’re working on rolling what features we can into the current version of the website. We’re also planning for a new look to Kontrib over the next several months so stay tuned. In the meantime, please keep the suggestions coming! We love to hear from all of you!

Technorati Tags: CenterNetworks, Kontrib Video Review, Kontrib, Machine Translation, Automated Translations, Automated Machine Translations, Social Bookmarking

We’re proud to announce that Kontrib now offers full Arabic support for all the content posted on the website. This means we now offer automatic translations in the following directions:

• Arabic -> English
• Arabic -> French
• Arabic -> Spanish
• English -> Arabic
• French -> Arabic
• Spanish -> Arabic

This also means we now offer full support for four languages (Arabic, English, French, and Spanish). We’ll be adding additional language directions over the next several months so stay tuned. If you have a particular language direction that you would like to see Kontrib support, please let us know!

Technorati Tags: Kontrib, Machine Translation, Arabic Translations, Arabic to English, Arabic to French, Arabic to Spanish, Spanish to Arabic, French to Arabic, English to Arabic, Automatic Translations

Kontrib was mentioned in two different blogs today. We were featured in a VentureBeat article located here. Here’s a small blurb from the article:

Kontrib is slick because it translates both the article summary hosted at Kontrib’s site, and the original article linked to. Comments are also translated.

We were also covered over at Startup Meme here. Here’s a quote from that blog posting:

This is really a good service as most of the times specially in political scenarios we are left with just english version of the story, just because the Arabic or Spanish version is indigestible. Kontrib will surely change this and i personally think that it will gain traction, all it needs is some event or a viral story posted to its site. I must confess that this is the first Digg clone that I liked.

Last but certainly not least, Language Weaver issued a press release about Kontrib entitled: “Language Weaver Launches Consumer-Focused Subsidiary, Kontrib, First to Offer Multilingual Social Bookmarking Site”.

Nice day in the press!

[Check out the VentureBeat article]

[Check out the Startup Meme article]

[Check out the Language Weaver Press Release]

Technorati Tags: Social Bookmarking, Translations, Automatic Translations, Language Weaver, Kontrib, Machine Translation, Multilingual Social Bookmarking, VentureBeat, Startup Meme, Press Release

There were several notable translations found today on Kontrib’s website that I wanted to give mention here on the blog. Here’s the list:

• Why we mourn? (although it should have said “Why do we cry?” - close enough! The article itself is translated from Spanish into English and you get a good feel for what the article is trying to say. Of course had the title been translated into “Why do we cry?”, we’d get a better understanding of the article from the get go.
• killing 8 people in Mogadishu clashes - Here’s an Arabic article on the BBC website that talks about the violence that erupted in the Somalian capital of Mogadishu. The english translation of the article can be found here.
• Microsoft is situated in the strategic enclave of the business of mobile telephony of Google - Now this one is a bit more complicated to explain. Basically the notion is - if Google is going to enter the mobile communications arena, there’s a chance that Google and Microsoft will have to work together IF Google wants to create devices like smartphones etc.
• One of the most comlex objects mathematics finally described - this is one of my favorites so far. It’s a french article about how a mathematical structure called E8 was finally described. What’s cool is the relative complexity of the article - especially when it comes to the terms used.

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Here’s an interesing post over at the Shanghaiist.com blog site. It’s entitled “Still lost in translation, but with Google we lose less” and it’s about the current state of affairs with freely available machine translation technologies - notably from Google and AltaVista’s Babelfish.  The posting actually references another blog posting made over at the China Herald which took time to compare output in various languages supported by these websites.

So what are the conclusions? It seems clear that statistical machine translation technology is ahead of the game when compared to rule based MT systems.. yet there is still room for growth. While Google’s Chinese to English system did OK, their English to Chinese output was “a disaster”.

Here’s a recommendation from the folks at the Shanghaiist when it comes to Google Translate:

“Always use discretion when doing automatic translation, and conduct your best double-check before using it, even when translating small snippets of text. The last thing you want to do is publish something that ends up hurting the feelings of the Chinese people.”

Thanks to H & B for the link!

[Check it out]

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If you run or operate a blog, then you should definitely check out this blog posting over at ProBlogger.net. This article focuses on the topic of blog translations and how more and more websites are hiring human translators to translate content into several languages.

But why do this you might ask?

There are two major reasons for distributing your blog in several languages.  First, making your content available in multiple languages can potentially increase your readership and exposure on the Internet. This means more users will find and understand your postings which means additional dialogue can take place between readers and yourself. Also consider this. Your site is now available in English, French, and Spanish, which means your content will be discovered by more search engines which again increases your readership. It’s a wonderful world isn’t it? 

Secondly, offering multiple translations ultimately means higher revenues. As more readers are exposed to your website, this could potentially result in higher revenues due to online advertisments or sponsorships. You can take this even further by allowing readers to communicate with one another by offering integrated translations (human or machine) through comments and messaging systems.

So how do you make your site multilingual?

There are several methods to translate your site. You could hire human translators to translate stories on your site although this could get costly initially. If you’re tight on your budget, you could opt for machine translation technologies from a variety of vendors. There are several MT solutions available and there also blog plugins that can utilize this technology.

Alternatively, you can also utilzie Kontrib.com as a way to translate some of your content. Everything submitted to Kontrib is translated using Language Weaver’s Automated Machine Translation technology into several languages. Our online comments are also translated and soon the message systems will be automatically translated into different languages.

As you can see, there are several different solutions available to translate your content - from human translators to machine translation solutions. Take your pick (based on your budget of course) but one thing is clear - making your blog accessible in multiple languages is the next big thing. Thanks H. for the link!

[Check it out]

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If you operate a blog, then you can easily submit your blog postings to Kontrib using FeedBurner’s FeedFlare service. You’ll need to sign up with FeedBurner of course (and they do an awesome job of creating and managing your RSS feeds) but once you do, you can select all sorts of FeedFlares from their catalog including the one from Kontrib. You can see their online catalog here. You can also find our FeedBurner FeedFlare here.

Of course you can also submit stories to Kontrib by selecting “Kontribute” on the front page of Kontrib (again, you’ll need to register before doing so). However, using FeedBurner’s FeedFlare service is a quick and easy way to get readers to submit content from your website onto several different social bookmarking services.

Enjoy!

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