***not a pressing demand just an idea for the future***
Here's an idea to help with the need for more Chinese/English translations of community discussion.
1 delegate who is fluent in Chinese (Mandarin) and English, who acts as escrow and to quickly check the quality of the translations. I'll call him delegate T (for translate).
English user writes a post he/she would be happy to pay a tip to have translated into Chinese. He presses the T button at the bottom of his post and sends 0.50bitUSD (or however much he wants) to delegate T, who holds it in escrow. Delegate T automatically sends out a notification (via email, or forum PM, whatever) to a list of subscribed translators, notifying them of the new task available.
One of them 'claims' the task and the others translators are notified (or can view it somewhere) that it has been claimed, and not available anymore. The tasks status is changed to 'being translated now!' (viewable by anyone). He has 1 hour to complete the translation or else the task becomes unclaimed again and the other translators are notified and he loses the claim.
Once the translation is complete, the translator publishes the translation and sends a notification to delegate T to check it and release the funds. If the translation is of reasonably high quality (as judged by delegate T), he releases funds and the translator is paid. If the translation is of too poor quality delegate T can refuse payment until the translation is improved to a reasonable standard.
Users can chose to pay for any post to be translated, not just ones they have written. So if for example there's a great thread that a few users agree should be entirely translated, they can all chip in to get each post translated and published in order. There could be an option for 'translate whole thread' to ensure it gets re-published in the correct order.
This would end up saving money, as it would be much cheaper than paying a team of full time translators. And much cheaper than having the Chinese + English community become divided and having increasingly incompatible ideas about BTS.
Hopefully all translation requests would be complete with 24 hours of request. This also solves the problem of things getting translated more than once as that everyone could see the status of the translation
Why would community members pay for translation?
- To help foreign language speakers understand their vision of BTS more and be inspired, to help keep confidence high and community together and to make sure everyone understands what is going on.
- To convince the foreign language speakers that a delegate they support is worth voting for. This allows them to easily spread their grass-roots campaign to the Chinese/whoever.
Too early to implement as we don't even know which social platform this discussion will all end up being done on, but I would say that eventually this may be a vital feature.