On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 6:01 PM, Amir E. Aharoni<amir.ahar...@gmail.com> wrote:
> An unedited machine-translated text is likely to be speedily deleted > as patent nonsense, before copyvio is even considered. > > -- > אמיר אלישע אהרוני > Amir Elisha Aharoni > > http://aharoni.wordpress.com If it is deleted as nonsense, that will be a gross error by the administrator, at least in enWP. It is usually possible to roughly understand what is meant in a Google translation. That's enough to defeat speedy deletion. What these texts need is revision. I think of them essentially as an automated dictionary. If I have any understanding of the subject at all, my quite elementary knowledge of French or German lets me compare the translation with the original, and then rewrite the article into acceptable English much more rapidly than if I had only the original text and a conventional dictionary--essentially as I would do of texts translated into English by someone with a good knowledge of the original language but a very minimal knowledge of the target language, English and no grasp of English idiom. What I usually find in such translations is that only part of the article is translated--sometimes only the lede paragraph, but rarely including the references or figure legends or the like--which often causes these articles to be nominated for deletion as non notable and unsourced, by people too lazy to follow the interlanguage link. .Almost never is there any search for the correct internal wikilinks Even in languages I cannot actually read, such as the other Romance languages , or Russian, I can generally at least add the references section and fix some of the internal links, and thus preserve the article for someone who can do better. David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
