Mutual benefit principle

I'm not convinced about the effectiveness of the points system on this website. We should consider what sort of people will submit text to be translated, and why will others give up their time to translate it.

In general, I suspect people will submit text for tranlsation, because they are incapable of translating it themselves. Because of their lack of language skills, they will in general be people who will have few or no points to trade in.

On the other hand, I believe many translators will donate their services because they enjoy translation, are willing to help others, while at the same time exercising their language skills. Such people would often be willing to translate text for even for people who do not have any points. However, it seems to me the system as it stands would not allow this.

Having said that, we we need to avoid that people abuse the good will of translators willing to do a certain amount of work for free.

So, how to deal with this? I have two ideas:
a) allow people to submit text for translation, without needing to have any points. These texts are in a separate section into which translators willing to do pro bono work may look.

b) there could be a bidding system for translations, somewhat like e-Bay. The translator who bids the lowest number of point wins the job. This way, if a translator is willing to bid zero points, he may. Or, if a particular language pair is in high demand, then a translator is rewarded for this special skill, and can charge more points for their rare skill. This lets market forces drtermine the exchange rate between languages.

What do others think?

Hi mateo,
Thanks for your suggestions. I know that most of the translators do it because they like it and not for the points. Maybe the points add a funny side to the translation.
The idea b) seems to me very interesting but hard to implement and to understand for visitors. What about taking into account the ratio of done translation and undone translation to fix the value of a translation?

The idea a) is nice too. This is a heavy developpement. I'm afraid that if we allow all translations in this section, they will be a lot of time wasted by the translators.
People who register can already spend 300 points without doing any translation, maybe I could increase to 500 points (equivalent to 500 english characters)?

I've also planned to give points to interesting projects that would presents themselves in the forum. These can be interesting texts to translate.

I like the idea of giving 500 points upon registration, but people might register several accounts to abuse this idea.
Maybe you should make it so registered users need to wait 15 days until they can post a translation?
Or maybe you need a minimum avarage rating?
I think those can take the fun out of registering several times..

Also, about the points to interesting projects in the forum, I think that's a great idea.

Compared to Babelfish, cucumis.org is a very slow tool. That's why people prefer automatic translation tools. Registering is not very quick and if you must add 15 days before using cucumis.org, I think we'll get very few submitions.
For now there are 300 hidden bonus points (the user can't see them in his profile). In this way, I hope we'll avoid spam.
For the projects, I hope I have soem time to develop the project section of cucumis.org soon.