[Translators-l] from angel rodriguez about wikipedia.org and google/language_tools

[SJ]

On 11/25/05, angel rodriguez <angelrr7702 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I went to www.wikipedia.org and I found that in English they had
> 831000 articles but in other language like Spanish they only had 75
> 000. I understand that is difficult to find people that in  the spare
> of their time do all the translation for one language to other.

Please note that different language editions of Wikipedia are rarely
direct translations; they are most often written independently in each
language.

> The other day I tray other way,it  was to use translate, a web page tools
> from  google( http://www.google.com/language_tools) from English to
> Spanish. I found this tool very useful because...
>                                                ...in reality I had 831 000 articles in
> Spanish. I want to know if there is a way to use this tools to make a
> more permanent translation of the majority of articles in English to
> another language

The simple answer is "Yes" -- there might be a way to use tools like
Google's webpage-translator to help translators and writers with their
work; and to give readers more options when looking for content in
their language.  I would love to see something like this happen.  It
would require coordination between the developers of Google's
translation tool and the developers of the Wikipedia interface[s].

Of course these kinds of machine translations are inferior to 'real'
human translations, as Yann notes.  But Google in particular has been
making strides in this area.  Wikipedia would be an interesting
testbed for new automated translation tools, precisely because it has
original (not translated) content on the same topic in dozens of
languages, for tens of thousands of topics.

++SJ