Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet

Re:Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet by rspeer on Thursday November 15, 2018 @03:58PM (#18463239)

If the author is reading this: When someone provides you a pro-bono translation, by all means credit them, but do not let them host it on their own site.

Frequently, they are siphoning your PageRank. They will eventually replace the translation with monetized content of their choice. A good translation takes work! If you got a translation for free, why should you believe it's good, or that it has no ulterior motive?

A firm called "WebHostingGeeks" used to do this all the time. They would offer free translations of blog posts, into languages the author probably didn't speak (and they didn't either, they were just using machine translation). They'd ask authors to link to the translation on their site, and over time they would add their SEO links to the translation.

I first noticed this when WebHostingGeeks offered me a Romanian translation of ConceptNet documentation, my roommate spoke Romanian, and he said "maybe I'm not used to reading technical documentation in Romanian but I think this is nonsense".

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet by J_cst on Thursday November 15, 2018 @05:19PM (#18464007)

I am Italian and can confirm that the translation is perfectly fine. At the very beginning of the translation, in italics, the translator states that he follows Endeavour because on that blog he finds interesting articles about statistics and programming. After that he gives full credit to the author and back links the original post. To me there's nothing of suspicious or malicious.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet by rspeer on Thursday November 15, 2018 @05:36PM (#18464134)

I'm glad that this is a good example of a translation, and not a trick.

I still think that if a blog post author says "this is a translation of my post", the author should host it as a sibling page on their own server. That allows them to more reliably vouch for its content, and removes an avenue that can be used for trickery.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet by dugluak on Thursday November 15, 2018 @04:52PM (#18463792)

But this one doesn't looks bad, the Italian translator even goes beyond the article by providing visualizations of the concept.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet by HAL9000Ti on Thursday November 15, 2018 @04:38PM (#18463639)

You are exceedingly suspicious for no reasons, people just like to translate articles that they enjoyed reading, the vast majority of times that's the only motive.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet by dugluak on Thursday November 15, 2018 @04:49PM (#18463748)

reader is not the culprit. The website translating the content for free could have its own good/bad intents.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet by userbinator on Thursday November 15, 2018 @10:31PM (#18466150)

The obsession with SEO is what leads to things like this in the first place.

Maybe the sooner people stop paying attention to it, the sooner search engines will learn to find better metrics.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet by chrismcb on Thursday November 15, 2018 @11:39PM (#18466457)

You mean better metrics that can be optimized?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet by gboudrias on Thursday November 15, 2018 @04:30PM (#18463563)

Yeah this is weird. Also, if OP doesn't speak Italian themselves, how can they attest to the quality of the translation?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet by thedirt0115 on Thursday November 15, 2018 @06:30PM (#18464510)

I have a couple L2’s that I mostly speak and read, virtually no writing - my grammar is poor and my vocabulary is limited. Because of this I would feel uncomfortable/embarrassed to translate any tech stuff I wrote to it. However, I could read someone else’s translation and know if it’s way off the mark. Also, I have plenty of friends that speak the language natively, so I could ask them to review. If they say it’s good, I’d vouch for the translation because I trust them (even if I couldn’t read it at all).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet by gboudrias on Thursday November 15, 2018 @08:36PM (#18465455)

Oh ok cool :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet by Recursing on Thursday November 15, 2018 @04:52PM (#18463790)

I'm Italian, for what it's worth the translation seems fine, even if the writing quality is not as good as the source and maybe the joke about "Bayesians being allowed to make such statements" is a bit lost

[ Parent | on HN ]