Translated.by: crowdsourced volunteer translations to Eastern Euro languages

Translated.by is a service for groups of volunteers working to group-translate texts into their native language, intended primarily for use on magazine articles, blog posts, and other short works. Presently, the language options are English, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian, though the creator, Ruslan Grokhovetskiy notes that he can switch on other languages "on request." Ruslan and friends have used the service to translate a bunch of my articles and stories into Eastern European languages, and they're on the lookout for others interested in playing along!

Translated by humans (Thanks, Ruslan!)

Previously:

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: crowdsource • language • Technology • translation

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Anonymous

This is a cool idea, and I bet that it will function well for Russians who want access to something written in English. The trouble starts when they are trying to go in the other direction. Most Russians don’t speak English well enough to do a better Russian-to-English translation than Google Translations, and I don’t think that many native English speakers have enough knowledge of Russian to participate. Also, you shouldn’t ever use this kind of service for important texts, because we all know what happens when quality control is crowdsourced together with content generation (think Batuta hoax on Wikipedia, etc.)
cnawan

I’d like to do grammar-polishing for something like this, but it’s hard to know the context they need.
Is ‘Keep silent’ good enough to understand, or is ‘Please be quiet’ better for a sign in a public place (state owned, private merchant..)?
Anonymous

And not only into Eastern Euro languages, but to a whole bunch of languages: Arabic, Belarusian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, German, Greek, English, Spanish, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Latvian, Dutch, Polish, Portugese, Romanian, Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Udmurt, Mari, Klingon, Quenya.