Clearly we have members here who can translate to English from Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, Italian, French, Irish, Chinese, American etc. They all have subject knowledge too. Is it worth setting up a translation service here indepenent of google?

A first step would maybe to provide the untranslated version as a general rule, when using automated translators, since the automated translators sometimes uglify the result to a degree, that it's almost impossible to deduce the initial meaning.
So there is at least a chance to find out what the translation should have been, whenever someone finds time to do a more appropriate translation.

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It is perhaps something to consider for the future.
We do have a lot of members with multi-language skills, but of course it is dependent on their time and willingness to do the translation work which can be lengthy.

Pandenko has done a wonderful job for us over the years with Japanese information and others have helped out a lot with interpreting Chinese and Russian content.

The Admin/Mod team are hoping to deploy an updated version of the IPBoard software in the next few months, which may provide new and better ways for members to share content.
I think we can put any formal process on a translation service on hold till then.

In the meantime, I would encourage any members with good multi-language skills who would like to translate documents to do so and provide links to that work (either through a blog or an attached Word or PDF document, rather than putting fully translated text and image content directly on the Forum itself.
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i know that googletranslate is not perfect
http://translate.google.com/translate?prev...stdate%3D604800

Mozilla's "seamonkey" has a nice tool in the menu to use it fo the page

but for a lot of the Romanian and Czech sites i read it works fairly well
For Chinese webpages ???
googletranslate keeps kicking me out saying the sites are spam ( i am guessing something do the "the great firewall" and google just not mixing well)

French and German sites work well

One thing that might be useful, would be a sticky topic (with heavy moderation and no discussion) to post language specific keywords or acronyms.

Proper terms help in searches if you don't know the language.
Translating results is easy. Translating the questions (search queries) is not.

For example, if you google translate "painel de controlo" (portuguese) you get "control panel".
But searching for "dashboard" would also be useful.

Hmmm...this is a very good idea. It might be very useful to have a list, somewhere, of mission names in native languages and character sets, linked to Google searches for those results. For example:

Hayabusa 2: はやぶさ2

We could make this a sticky topic somewhere. Assistance in compiling such a list would be very welcome.

My experience is that Wikipedia is a good source of mission and instrument names.
I usually start with the english page and then check the different language versions.
Usually the english version is more complete, but the local versions are better for spellings, investigator or entity names, etc, etc.

Sometimes it helps to search by entities and dates. There are yearly or monthly reports that you can find as PDFs.
Got some stuff about japanese probes from the 1980s that way.