Today, I’m going to spend a little bit of time writing about a project of mine that I’ve been working on for several months now. The project formally launched this week and is called Kontrib.com (http://www.kontrib.com). So, what is Kontrib you mght ask? It’s a new multi-lingual social bookmarking website that allows users to submit, vote, and comment on user generated stories. Kontrib adds a new twist to the social bookmarking market by introducing automatic machine translation into the picture. The site automatically translates content into several different languages such as English, French, and Spanish. There’s also limited support for Arabic on Kontrib (limited to translating Arabic into English at this time). Kontrib’s ultimate goal is to foster communication on the Internet by reducing the language barrier. Yes, that’s a tall order indeed! Let’s spend a little bit of time going over Kontrib and what it has to offer.

At a glance…

When you go to Kontrib.com for the very first time, you’ll be presented with the following screen shot. As I mentiond earlier, the site is designed to be multilingual from the get go. Kontrib defaults to presenting information in English but if you want to change the language, you can easily click on the language links in the upper right hand corner here.

Kontrib currently supports Arabic, English, French, and Spanish but more are planned for the future.Mot of the content available on Kontrib is available in multiple languages. I do stress most since at this time we do not have complete support for Arabic. Here’s what the site looks like in Arabic:

In French:

In Spanish:

What does this mean exactly? If a user submits a story in English at 11am – that very same story will be available in Spanish and French within a few minutes. The content is automatically translated by Language Weaver’s automated machine translation servers.

The latest stories submitted by Kontrib users are shown in the front page. You can also see which stories are considered “Top Stories” by clicking on the Top Stories tab. The right sidebar shows the recent 10 “Top Stories” and the last 10 commented stories. This allows you to easily track which stories are being commented on.

Now if you’re just a casual reader, you can simply go to Kontrib.com, select the language of your choice, and read the site’s content. No problem. If you’d like to partake in submitting stories, voting on stories, or adding comments, then you’ll need to register with the site.

Registration process

The registration process is pretty straightforward. Simply click on the “Register” button on the upper left hand corner of the site and you’ll be presented with the following screenshot.

Once you have finished registering, an email will be sent to you from Kontrib with your user password (if you don’t see one, make sure you check your spam filter!). Simply log in with this password and you’ll be all set to go.

Looking around

Logging into Kontrib is also an easy process – simply enter your username and password on the upper left hand side.

Once you’re logged in, you can change your profile information by clicking on the “My Profile” link and selecting “Edit Profile”. Your profile information includes the native language of your choice. This is an important feature within Kontrib. It allows the site to figure out which version of the story to show you at run time. Thus if your native language is Spanish, everything on Kontrib will be in Spanish – from the user interface, to the stories being presented on the front page (although you can override this feature).

You can also edit your preferences within the profile section. Preferences that you can modify include:

  • Story Display Mode: Kontrib will default to showing you stories that are available in your native language. However, you have the option of seeing everything on Kontrib’s site – including stories that were not translated into your language (or were simply not available in your language)
  • Page Reload: You can opt to automatically refresh the front page
  • Open Links In: Stories can be opened in the same window or in a new window

You can also see what stories you’ve “kontributed” on Kontrib – in case you’ve forgotten of course.

Finally, there’s a little “Bookmarks” feature which allows you to save off stories that you found interesting (but you may or may not have voted on). When you come across a story that interests you, simply click on “Bookmark article”.

Kontribute!!

The real fun comes in “Kontributing” to the site. If you come across a webpage or web link that’s particularly interesting to you – share it with the rest of the Kontrib community by clicking on the “Kontribute” button on the upper left hand corner.  Clicking that button will present the following screen:

You need to fill out the following information:

Link – this is the URL to the web page you found

Link Language – this is the language of the URL being submitted to us. It could be in Arabic, English, French, or Spanish

Title – provide a title for the story that you are submiting to Kontrib

Description – provide a brief description of the story you are submitting. If you can’t come up with anything, you can also quote a few lines from the original URL. However, make sure to quote them ok?

Story Language – this is the language of the overall story you are submitting. This is not necessarily the same as the “Link Language”. Case in point – you could be an English speaking user but you come across an Arabic webpage of interest. You would create a new story with English words in the title and description. Yet the URL being submitted is in Arabic. Thus, you’d select the “Link Language” as Arabic, while the “Story Language” would be in English. Make sense?

Choose a Topic: Pick a single topic that best matches the story you are kontributing to Kontrib.com.

Finally, click on the “Kontribute Story” button and you’ll be on your way. Once a story is submitted to Kontrib, the site will attempt to translate the content into several languages.

Kontrib supports the following languages – English, French, and Spanish – with limited support for Arabic at this time. The actual language translation directions are as follows:

  • Arabic -> English
  • English -> French
  • English -> Spanish
  • French -> English
  • French -> Spanish
  • Spanish -> English
  • Spanish -> French

As you can see, we are not fully supporting Arabic at this time but you can be sure that we’ll be working on it down the road. In fact, we will be introducing more language directions over time so please feel free to suggest directions.

We’ll be the first to acknowledge that the translations are far from perfect. There will be stories that translate wonderfully and yes, there will be stories that will be complete gibberish. However, more often than not, you’ll find stories that translate decently well. These translations will be good enough to provide a general understanding of the story at hand. To help Kontrib figure out which translations are good and which ones are bad, we ask users a simple question – “Was this translation helpful?”.

Back to stories now..  Once a story has been submitted and translated, any user can see the available translations for that story. Here’s a snapshot of a story in several languages:

Users can submit comments to stories in a simple blog like style commentary. These comments are also translated into multiple languages so it’s important that you specify the language that your comment is written in.

Down the road…

We’re just barely scratching the surface of what Kontrib will offer this year. One of the key features we’ll be adding shortly is the ability for users to suggest translations for badly translated text. This information will be useful for us to build better translation systems for all of you. The better the translation feedback, the better the quality being presented back to you.

We’ll be adding several social networking style features and will allow more user customizations down the road.

So why do this?

So why bother making yet another social bookmarking website? There are already so many of them out there on the Internet and my goodness – there are definitely some popular heavyweights. There’s one small problem – all of these social bookmarking websites are available in a single language – whether it’s all English or all French or all Spanish etc. Wouldn’t it be cool if the Spanish Internet users out there could read the very same content that the English readers were talking about? Wouldn’t it be neat for English readers to see what Arabic folks were reading about? We think so.. and hence this is what Kontrib is all about.

Kontrib’s goal is to make use of today’s language technology to help bridge the gaps that exist in today’s societies due to language barriers. If we can help someone understand what someone else is saying in a different language correctly, then we’ve done our deed. Certainly machine translation is far from perfect – there’s plenty of room for growth and it’s an exciting field to be in right now. There’s one thing we can definitely say – machine translation will improve over time and that my friends will hopefully mean better communications around the world.

Now what’s in it for you? Media companies and publishers will be able to reach a wider audience simply because their content is available in multiple languages. More localization available will of course translate into more eyeballs viewing the content. What about regular readers like you and I? We’ll be able to read and digest more information than ever before. This could also provide the opportunity for us to see different opinions and viewpoints on different topics.

Wrapping up…

Kontrib.com takes social bookmarking to a new level by making user generated content available to a wider audience of readers on the Internet. Through the use of automated machine translation technology, we can begin to see a world where the language barrier slowly disappears and people can communicate with one another irregardless of their background. Yes we’re still far away from that realization but this is a positive step in that direction. Check out Kontrib at http://www.kontrib.com.

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