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

[Cathy Ma]

On 11/25/05, SJ <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.



Sometimes, as a bilingual (chinese-english) I found it useful to translate
from BabelFish first then manually edit the addition.  Of course this can be
done by manually Wikipedians themselves.  However I also see that if
everything is translated from English to other language the
perspective/originality for some current events like articles maybe gone.

I would support translation tool for experimentation but also remain a bit
wary about the cultural impacts of that.
Thanks.

xcathy

++SJ
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--
MPhil Candidate,
Department of Sociology,
The University of Hong Kong
http://cathyma.net
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