Monday, May 04, 2009

Translation for Comments on Flickr

Auto translation is something that has seen a great deal of hype ever sinceBabel Fish came out in the mid 90s. It's not yet good enough to do large sections of text. Though it can give you the feel for what an article in another language is saying. I'm not sure how many people use Google's Chat translation. Google chat is mostly tied to gmail, how often do you email with people in different languages?

However flickr is unique in that it's a community based on images, you can appreciate images in any language, so that brings people together. We leave short comments for one another. Short enough that translation software would really help. If I'm commenting on someone's photo and their default language isn't that same as mine, it would be cool to have flickr offer to translate the comment. After all Yahoo owns both Flickr and Babel Fish.

- Peace

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