Traducción

I came across an article today talking about Facebook adding a feature with translations. Similar to Google Chrome feature, which allows the user to translate the page to your language. Before I found this I was working on a new design for the app so I happen to think about that and how I can apply some feature like that.

I've been thinking about translation because I know this will be something that a lot of teacher will need to communicate with parents. When I first starting thinking about this feature I thought that the parent will have a default language set and in what ever language the teacher sends it, the parent will receive it in the language the parent set it as. So all the translation will be done in the background leaving the teacher with nothing to do, just click send and it will automatically be done. Now translating something will not always come out meaning the same thing when it's translated. Perfecting this is something that will take time and will need user input and learn over time what the teacher/parent is meaning when they send their message.

What Google Chrome and now Facebook will just allow for the user to translate the page, but this will unfortunately will not work on a phone when the user wants to translate the language to their language. This is a great feature for online use and something that we can use. Now this can go somewhere though. It will lead to do better things that will allow people to communicate with others from different parts of the world.

I think for this kind of application the best thing and most efficient way to communicate in different languages is...

• Have parents set a default language in which they want to notified
• Translation will be done in the background 
• When a parent replies the teacher will receive the message in English
• Again all translation will be done in the background

Now I bet you have some questions or concerns about how this can actually work. Well I haven't tried it out yet, but with the technology that we have I think it's possible to make. Now some questions might be...

• Will the user be able to see what they send?
• What if the user sends a smiley face?
• Can the user send it in the same language as the end user?
• What if there is a spelling/grammer mistake?
• How fast will the translation be?
• What languages will be offered?

These are just some of the questions that might be thought of plus much more. This is just the beginning phase, which will mainly be focused on testing. 

Any questions or concerns that you have please feel free to let me know and comment or email  me. 

Enjoy Fall and Happy Halloween!