Translate chat messages

[amyjko]

What are you trying to do that you can't?

When teachers and students are chatting with each other, if they use different languages, they may not understand each other.

What is your idea?

We could add a translate button that would translate the chat text into the current user's locale. This could be optionally saved in the chat, so that we don't redundantly ask for a translation.

[leisha5]

I would like to work on this @amyjko :)

Some initial thoughts:

• Would it be more helpful to translate a chat message by message? or translate the whole chat in one go?

• I talked to Adrienne about this, and she said it would be more helpful to translate the whole chat in one go as it would be less tedious. Additionally, if we're adding that option, it could potentially remove the need to save the translations in the chat.

• Do we want to enable translating everything in one go (e.g. project's language, interface language, chat language) or entity-by-entity?

• Typically people who know multiple languages tend to get caught up by singular words or phrases. Enabling translating each entity separately would also make the process faster as the user could quickly toggle back and forth. However, it could increase confusion because there would be multiple translate options.

• We were also discussing that it might be helpful for language acquisition if they could see the original message and the translation side by side.

• A few different options for placing the translate option: next to the message in a different language, at the top of the chat, in the tool bar next to the bold, italic options. Would need to consider how it would render at different magnifications and in different screens.

• At the top of the chat would make the users immediately aware of such an option, and would also separate the option for translating the project's language from translating the chat's language

• What if a user has two selected languages (in order of preference) and they want to translate into their second choice language? Should there be an option for them to translate the chat/message into whatever language of their choosing, regardless of what their locale currently says? Can we enable translating a message into a language different from the rest of the locale?

• Giving users the option to translate into whatever language would seem more helpful than the system automatically deciding the translating language, but this point needs further discussion.

Side note: For languages that do not use a latin alphabet, do we want to offer a fusion translation as well (Chinglish, hinglish, etc.)?

[amyjko]

This is a good exploration of the design space! I look forward to seeing a proposal that you think balances needs well.

Re: "fusion" translations, we don't have a way to machine translate those.

[leisha5]

Some more thoughts:

When you're using Google and are accessing a webpage in a different language, Google Translate pops up and says translate x language to the language of the browser. Example for opening a web page written in Spanish when the browser language is English:

This could be a possible design for this.

However, let's say there are three or more collaborators, all of whom speak different languages. Meaning, there are 3+ languages. In such cases, this design wouldn't really help. It wouldn't translate everything in the chat, only messages written in one specific language to the chosen platform language. It would impact collaboration and understanding because users would have to constantly keep translating the chat.

Because of this, I think a better design would be translating everything in the chat, regardless of the language it was originally written in, to a specific language. The default option could be the chosen platform language, but to accommodate multi-lingual users, I think we should keep it a free-for-all option as "Translate chat messages to x". x could be all the languages supported by machine translation.

[amyjko]

I like the idea of choosing one target language, and then using each individual chat message's source language as the source. I think that would just require us to decide how to label the language of a chat message. Probably implicitly by using the UI's current locales?

[leisha5]

Implicitly would work for most cases, but it is possible that a user could be using the platform in one language and communicating in another. There needs to be a way to have an accurate language tag for each message. Perhaps users could input what language they're typing in? The default could be the current locale, but if the platform could recognise that perhaps the user is typing in a different language, a tooltip could appear asking them to confirm the language of the message?

[amyjko]

I think that's sensible. It could just be a drop down next for the chat message, so someone could change the default language tag.

[leisha5]

A few things decided and some left to discuss.

• The language tag drop down will be in the tool bar, with a tool tip appearing when a user types a message in. Potential tooltip message: "Tag your message with the language it was written it".
• Chat translations are persistent, locally or cloud-based?
• The translated message will appear directly below the original message. Should the language tags be displayed with the messages? I was thinking the two letter language code could appear below the message.

Potential design for how chat translations would look.