On Sun, 25 Jul 2010 18:10:54 +0300, Amir E. Aharoni wrote: > 2010/7/25 Shiju Alex <[email protected]>: >> Hello All, >> >> Recently there are lot of discussions (in this list also) regarding the >> translation project by Google for some of the big language wikipedias. >> The foundation also seems like approved the efforts of Google. But I am >> not sure whether any one is interested to consult the respective >> language community to know their views. > > At the same session at Wikimania a very sensible approach was presented > by Mikel Iturbe from the Basque Wikipedia: > > * They didn't use Google Translate, but an academically-developed tool, > which also happened to be Free Software - which diminished the arguments > about commercialization. >
Probably Matxin (http://sourceforge.net/projects/matxin/) Matxin is somewhat related to Apertium, which I am involved with. Some Apertium developers tried to make it less Basque-specific, but weren't entirely successful. > * The editors community was involved throughout the whole process. > > * Articles were not uploaded without correcting mistakes that the > translation software made. > > * What's also important, the corrections were reported to the > translation software developers, so they would try to improve it. > > Of course, not every language community can afford developing > Free-as-in-speech academic translation software, but the other points > are useful to everybody. Depending on the languages involved, the amount of resources available for those languages, and having realistic expectations, a usable system can be made in as little as 3-6 months by a single motivated volunteer, with help from experienced developers. Earlier this year, at the request of Crisis Commons, 3 of us built a Haitian Creole to English prototype in less than a week. Staying motivated is *hard*. We have 2-3 times as many half-working prototypes as we have released language pairs. Having realistic expectations is hard. People want English, and/or they want to include *everything* (budget at least a year of full time work for anything to English). If you know the difference between noun, adjective, and verb, understand Zipf's law, and want open source MT for a pair of languages, come find us on #apertium on FreeNode. We'll be happy to help. > > Mikel Iturbe's presentation: > * http://www.slideshare.net/janfri/wikimania2010 > > The academic papers related to that project: * > http://ixa.si.ehu.es/openmt2/argitalpenak_html * > http://ixa.si.ehu.es/Ixa/Argitalpenak/Artikuluak/index_html? Atala=Artikulua_Itzulpen_automatikoa _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
