About "Translated by humans" project

We are doing collaborative translations of texts. In a nutshell, people help each other translate interesting foreign language texts into their native language. It's mostly blog posts, magazine articles, docs, short stories and other materials licensed for free redistribution. (Soon there will be support for various formats).

Some call it a collaborative editing, others call it crowdsourcing. You can think of it as a wiki for translations.

Texts are translated and edited paragraph-by-paragraph, just by editing translations of fragments of the original text. If you don't like how a paragraph is translated, or if you have found a mistake, you can click on a paragraph translation and edit it. Every paragraph can be commented; you can request help, ask questions, and discuss translations of phrases.

You can start a public translation and get help from all the crowd, or you can bring together a closed group and do private translations. Private texts and translations can only be viewed and edited by you and your group.

All participant contributions are counted and recorded. Each contributor's name is shown in the credits, listed in order of their contribution volume. At the moment we are awarding points within the scope of single translations, but soon we will add different methods and offer quest-like gaming in order to make translating more fun, and to help you gain experience and develop your translation, editing and proofreading skills.

The site is still in beta. Some things will change. Some won't. Feel free to email us your suggestions.

Why are we doing all this? The vast majority of content is created by the English-speaking part of the Internet. (This majority is so overwhelming that UNESCO is concerned that in a hundred years language diversity will disappear.) So, statistics tell us that the vast majority of the really interesting content is in English. We want the non-English speaking part of the planet to partake in everything interesting and useful that is created in the world in English.

Second of all, we believe that a --million Сhinese-- group of enthusiasts with a passion for language is not only capable of translating on the same scale as the professional translators, but, in some cases, can do it even much better. Judge for yourself, because even the professional freelance translators require editors and proofreaders. The "smart mob" is able to proofread a translation and find mistakes faster, by an order of magnitude.

Translating the site to other languages

We would really appreciate your help in translating site interface to other languages, especially Spanish, German, French, and Belarusian. Translators will be honored by being mentioned and linked to from this page.