Ongoing translation in threads

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I am working towards a Discourse installation for an organization that works across the 55 member nations of the African Union. The platform must overcome a major communications barrier in Africa: most scholars and public servants in Africa receive their education in their former colonial language, so international organizations often end up with their members mixing in Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone (Portuguese) silos. Discourse stands poised to punch through this barrier, if chat threads can be automated for this functionality:

When I receive a message in a language that is not my own, I want to see that message in its original, in a shaded box, so that I can review the sender’s actual intent. Below that, I want to see the translation. Ideally, this would automatically break into paragraphs. [Paragraph 1 original]/ Paragraph 1 Translation. [Paragraph 2 original]/ Paragraph 2 Translation. [P3]/P3, etc. That is, if I receive a message in French, I must be able to see it in the original French, as well as the AI translation to English. When I then reply in English, a Francophone user must be able to see it in the original English as well as the proposed translation, a Lusophone user should see it in English and Portuguese, and a person in North Africa should be able to see it in English and Arabic. Then, they reply in their own language, and the process is reversed for the benefit of their correspondent.

The important things are:

  1. There should be minimal effort on the part of the user. Set it and forget it. Nobody should have to manually demand translation of each message - we need to minimize the learning curve.
  2. The original message must be present for view. This is best practice regarding machine translation. The recipient must know that they are viewing a computer approximation of the writer’s intent, and have recourse to double checking.
  3. One paragraph at a time. If the message is very long and requires a lot of scrolling, translating it as a single entity will cause difficulties with matching up the translated bits.
  4. Live chat as well as board threads. When a message is sent from chat in its original language, it should appear for the recipient in the original and in their language of choice in real time. This will be the killer app. You can’t do it on WhatsApp, which makes it very hard for someone in anglophone Nigeria (population 240 million) to have a successful conversation with someone in francophone Congo DRC (population 115 million).

If we can get this working for the initial organization, it can be replicated for other pan-African organizations. Please imagine the target user as an older scholar who does not have much digital savvy, and may have elegant French but only enough English to navigate an airport.