There are now initial translations for all 60 mini-stories in these languages. Slovak already is available but only has 50 stories, so I included initial translations for the missing ones.
If you speak any of these languages, know someone who does, or are a learner who might enjoy finding mistakes, the initial translations could use some corrections and audio recordings to bring them to life on LingQ. (Once all files are complete, they can be sent to Zoran).
I’ll be making a post every time a new language has all of its mini-stories translated and in need of correction and recording. The reason is that the “Search” function does not appear to find information from the content of a post, but only its title. So now people can maybe find this a little easier when looking for a particular language. Apologies for this post duplicating portions of the main post.
The original post for the project is here:
The project is located here:
Please note that this is a LingQ-community project, not an official LingQ-company project.
This project started when I tried as an exercise to translate the mini-stories into Norwegian by hand. There had been lots of talk of LingQ getting the mini stories but nothing ever happened, so I thought I’d give it a try. Not being at a high-level in the language, I knew my translations wouldn’t be great, but it was a fun exercise to try that took a long time. Somewhere in the middle of it I thought I could try the same thing for Irish and Maltese, both languages I’ve studied to the mid or upper beginner level. So I was working on all three at the same time.
I had been using Google translate when I needed to look up a word, but only individual words. When I finished Norwegian I tried using it to translate sentences to compare to what I came up with. It didn’t take long to realize that their translation was better than mine. Then I translated each story as a whole document and replaced a LOT of what I wrote with the machine translation. From there I just started using the machine translation entirely for Irish and Maltese.
Curious about the quality of the translations, I tried back-translating them into English using several different online machine translators where I became convinced that the results of machine translation are probably on par with those of an intermediate-level learner, or better in most cases. Not being fluent in the other languages, I can’t be sure that the quality from English into some L2 is the same as from that L2 into English, but I don’t think that is very important at this stage. They’re not perfect, but I think its good enough to get things started.
Also, I was looking to get real translations done for Irish. There are many services out there, but they are all quite pricey. Eventually I stumbled on a service that could proof-read and edit by hand with a native speaker, and it was significantly cheaper than their full translation service.
That was the point I realized the value in the machine translations as a more likely means to get a new language onto LingQ, either by (hopefully) less work needed to be done by a volunteer, or by reducing the cost to fund the language. So I started working on other languages and made this little project.
The corrected story reads more naturally, it feels like it has been written in Irish rather than translated directly. I speak Galway Irish so there’s a few things I would phrase slightly differently but that’s just down to dialect, I think what you have is excellent quality.
The next step will be to get the rest of them done. I’ll start looking into options to make that happen (perhaps crowdfunding or convincing LingQ to get behind Irish).
Just a point on the crowdfunding, maybe we should look into applying for a grant from the Irish government, they are always trying to promote the language so it might be worth checking out!