[Translators-l] Translators-l Digest, Vol 67, Issue 10

[Brian McConnell]

Hello,

This is Brian from Der Mundo. Several people have commented about our
choice to use Facebook Connect and I'd like to respond to that.

We don't require a login to view translations, but to edit
translations we do. Requiring users to login under some sort of
verified identity does two things: it rewards good behavior (we can
credit translators, show their pictures on a map, and so forth), and
it discourages anonymous trolls. It is also easier for users if they
can log in using an existing account versus creating yet another
account. We went with Facebook for the initial release because so many
people are already there, its easy to use, and is also widely used to
share links.

We do plan to support other systems, including Wikipedia (we are
working on a proposal for a signin process that will enable users to
login with their wikipedia account, while our system will get
information about a users access rights in wikipedia and weight their
submissions). Google, Linked In and Twitter are also on the plan.

For now, we are focused primarily on the following tasks:

* fixing what's broken (often someone else's html)
* adding crowd funded professional translation and more machine
translation options
* adding social features, such as showing translators for a page on a
popup or map
* identifying a few initial affinity groups who will use the system
heavily (we already have a group forming to translate LGBT news and
blogs for example)

We'll add more signon options once we have things running smoothly and
have the core features in place. We're very much of the release early,
release often mindset, so we will be adding more options. Google
signon is pretty easy for us to support since this runs mostly on App
Engine, so that will probably appear fairly soon. The other services
are somewhat harder to connect to, so we'll probably get to them a bit
later.

BTW, we are looking for people who are leaders among various affinity
groups (for example, people involved in reporting news from the
uprising in the middle east) to create translation communities. It is
easy to do with services like Google Groups, Listserv, etc to curate
content and organize translators, while Der Mundo is useful as an
editing and link sharing tool. I'd like to see a group emerge to
translate art related sites and blogs. In any case, there's lots of
interesting stuff out there that currently remains bottled up in its
source language.

Thanks again for your feedback. It's helping us sort out priorities as
we work on the service.

Brian