My name is Susan Kistler and I am the American Evaluation Association’s Executive Director and aea365’s regular Saturday contributor. For 2013, we’re striving to increase access to evaluation resources for our colleagues from around the corner and around the world.
Rad Resource – Translate! We have installed Google Translate on aea365. To translate both current and archived aea365 posts into the language of your choice, go to the aea365 website and select a language from the 60+ available via the translate pull-down on the right hand side.
Lesson Learned: Google Translate is machine translation, meaning that it is automated and translations are imperfect (but getting better all the time). Later this winter, we’ll be launching a program to clean up some of the Google translations for aea365. If you are bilingual, stay tuned! We may be seeking your help.
Get Involved – Expand the International Voices Represented on aea365: We’ll be conducting extra outreach this year to strive to expand the geographic diversity of contributors to aea365. Are you an evaluator practicing outside of the United States? Do you have experience, resources, tips, and lessons to share? We’d love to hear from you! Review the aea365 contribution guidelines at http://aea365.org/blog/?page_id=14 and send a draft post, or ask any questions, to aea365@eval.org. While we do post in English, if English is not your native language and you are less than fully comfortable writing in English, we’d be happy to assist with copyediting of draft posts if needed.
Cool Trick – Link to a Specific Post in a Specific Language: Earlier this week, I wanted to send one of the aea365 posts, automatically translated, to a member whose native language was Spanish. A little research, and voila, here is how to do it for any of the Google Translate languages:
- Navigate to the page on aea365 that you want to link to in a language other than English
- Add “#googtrans(en|es)” to the end of the URL and then copy the full new URL for sending
The above example will translate the page into Spanish, but you can use it to translate a page into any of the 60+ Google Translate languages, you’ll just need to exchange the “es” designation used for Spanish, to the appropriate ISO standard for your preferred target language. They may be found here in the column labeled “639.1”.
Here are a few examples:
- aea365 homepage in Spanish:
http://www.aea365.org/blog/#googtrans(en|es) - aea365 homepage in French:
http://www.aea365.org/blog/#googtrans(en|fr) - Recent post from Karen Anderson in Korean:
http://aea365.org/blog/?p=7941#googtrans(en|ko)
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.
Susan, how great to have this translation capacity. I’m eager to hear from our colleagues around the world who can now more easily share their experiences and can test out the translations. I suspect most will be good translations, although some might result in translations that Patricia and Jane can use for their Friday Funnies in the Genuine Evaluation blog.