In celebration of G20, I am now translating the top news articles on ToastyNews into English, French, German and Japanese using machine translation. ToastyNews is a news aggregator I run on Hong Kong independent news websites, basically my own Google News. The site is not very useful if you live in Hong Kong. Even though the site updates every hour, it generally takes a while for news to show up compared to traditional media. The site is very useful for me though, because the important news are all clustered into understandable groups when I get up.
The translation quality is quit bad. I would rate English translation as below average, and Japanese translation as really bad. I don’t know if there are ever going to be non-Hong Kongers who would read these translations, but it might give them an idea of what’s happening in Hong Kong, direct from Hong Kongers. Some of my thinking:
- Translation quality is no worse than if people use Google Translate directly. No damage done.
- It lists the important news in one place. In addition, the Timeline feature shows the development of the news stories over the week. This feature should be the most helpful to foreigners.
- Most importantly, this feature is free if I stay below certain quota. Why not?
Looking forward, I will watch the usage over time and add more languages if quota allows. I also plan to start clustering the translated articles with English sources like Hong Kong Free Press. That way, I can provide real English articles and maybe translate those to French and German which might be of higher quality because they share similar language roots.
Here are the links:
