Welcome

Welcome to Blalabel, the free online platform for collaborative text translation and interpretation.

Blalabel is based on the contributions of its members. Anyone can sign up, publish texts, propose translations, and make and receive corrections. Through this process, we expect the users to establish fruitful discussions enabling them to learn languages and broaden their knowledge.

Here is how Blalabel works summarized in a few simple steps:

First, you can publish the text that you want to translate, specifying the original language, the destination language and a category for its classification. Optionally, you may add comments to the text easening its translation and tags that delimit the classification and later search. If the text is not your own work you shall add the source and the author as well.

Then, other users or the same user initiating the topic may propose translations that will be assessed by the rest of the community. The assessment is individual, but a reply that is correct except for a few details should be voted up. On the other hand, a proposal that needs more time to correct than the time needed to propose a new one should be voted down.

When a proposal needs few changes and can be considered valid, these shall be added as comments which can be voted up or down too. Unlike proposals, comments are not limited to only corrections to particular aspects of a proposal. We also encourage you to discuss the proposal itself or other comments.

Proposals may and should be edited with the corrections suggested in the comments when there are errors to be fixed. In case several valid alternatives exist, the author of the proposal is entitled to choose whichever he considers best.

Contributions are valued by means of a voting system that generates a reputation for each language to which the user has contributed. There are some limitations when it comes to contributions assessment:

  • Users can vote for proposals up to 5 times per day.
  • Users can vote for comments up to 5 times per day.
  • Users need to accumulate a minimum reputation of 20 in the source and estination languages in order to be vote down a contribution.

Scores are assigned according to the following rules:

  • Every positive vote to a proposal credits the author with 10 points in both languages.
  • Every negative vote to a proposal penalizes the author with 8 points in both languages.
  • Every positive vote to a comment credits the author with 3 points in both languages.
  • Every negative vote to a comment penalizes the author with 2 points in both languages.
  • Every negative vote to a proposal or a comment penalizes the voter with 1 point in both languages.
  • Positive votes neither credit nor penalize the voter.

At Blalabel we believe that the best way to learn is by making mistakes, therefore we advise against deleting contributions with negative valuation. In fact, deleted contributions will be equally had into account for the reputation computation, so removing them just serves to lose valuable information about a wrong use from which we could learn.

We trust in the good use of this platform by the users. In any case, there exists the possibility to report contributions whose contents is disrespectful to other users or are not related to the proposed topic. We expect a responsible use of this tool and any abusive use will be punished. The texts and translations themselves will not be censored.

The Blalabel team wish this to be a dynamical platform where users can discover and propose new uses going beyond those detailed above. Therefore, we want to highlight that the described guidelines are illustrative and wish to promote the greatest flexibility to carry out other uses as long as they help to improve user experience.

Welcome and thank you!