|
“
| Doing a translation is often as simple as replying to an email. |
” |
|
|
Our free translation service relies on individuals passionate about languages giving some of their time to help others. Each translation is limited to a few lines of text and your contribution can be as small as one translation per day, so it won't take up much of your time. Volunteering with Sylang is a great way to enhance your language and translation skills, while providing valuable help to others.
Free Translation on the Web
Leaving out automated translation, there are other free language translation services on the web. They may be simple forums where registered members ask questions and translators occasionally post replies, or translation submission forms, where each request is emailed to a translator. The mains limitations of
the former approach are:
- the unstructured nature of translation requests (no
control over length, context not explicit)
- the lack of ownership of the translation: no one may ever answer, or several translators may post translations concurrently.
Translation requests submission forms, as used by most free
translation services, resolve both these limitations: each
translation is sent to one and only one translator, and it possible
to limit requests to a fixed number of characters.
Benefits to You
Visitors submit their translation requests to Sylang using an online form and
the translation management system forwards each request to a
translator by email. The translator then only needs to reply to this email typing his translation. We additionally provide some unique features.
Don't be overwhelmed by requests The system only accepts a limited number of translation requests each day. The size of each request is further limited (currently to 250 characters). You can change at any time how many requests you would like to receive daily.
Detect incorrect email addresses
Surprisingly many people provide an incorrect email address. So if left
undetected, your work would be fruitless because the person who
submitted the request will never be able to receive your translation. To guard against this, the system checks each email address before sending the corresponding request to a translator.
Prevent automated requests Free services on the web are often abused by some people submitting a large number of automated requests. Again,
the system ensures this does not happen.
Handle other forms of abuse Some other forms of abuse — like kids submitting their school assignments — cannot be detected automatically. For this reason, each translation request contains a link at the bottom of the message. Clicking on this link deletes the request from the system and notifies the person that his/her request was refused.
Benefits to Our VisitorsAs a benefit to our visitors, we show on our homepage the service load based on our current capacity and the number of translations already submitted. We also provide visitors with our expected reply time, so that people will only submit a request if they can wait that long. Our average reply time is usually no more than a few hours.
|
