As an admin in Bengali wikipedia, I had to deal with this issue a lot
(some of which were discussed with the Telegraph (India) newspaper
article). But I'd like to elaborate our stance here:
(The tool used was Google Translation Toolkit. (not Google Translate).
There is a distinction between these two tools. Google Translation
Toolkit (GTT) is a translation-memory based semi-manual translation
tool. That is, it learns translation skills as you gradually translate
articles by hand. Later, this can be used to automate translation.)
Issues:
1. Community involvement: First of all, the local community was not at
all involved or informed about this project. All on a sudden, we found
new users signing up, dropping a large article on a random topic, and
move away. These users never responded to any talk page messages, so
we first assumed these were just random users experimenting with
wikipedia.
Even now, no one from Google has contacted us in Bengali wikipedia and
inform us about Google's intentions. This is not a problem by itself,
but see the following points.
2. Translation quality: The quality of the translations was awful. The
translations added to Bengali wikipedia were artificial, dry, and used
obscure words and phrases. It looked as if a non-native speaker sat
down with a dictionary in hand, and mechanically translated each
sentence word by word. That led to sentences which are hard to
understand, or downright nonsensical.
The articles were half-done. Numerals were not translated at all. The
punctuation symbol for Bengali language (the danda symbol: ред ) was
not used. (apparently, GTT and/or the google transliteration tool does
not support that).
The articles were also full of spelling mistakes. The paid translator
misspelled many simple words, or even used different spellings for the
same word in different parts of the article.
Finally, different languages have different sentence structures.
Sometimes, a complex sentence is better expressed if broken up in two
sentences in another language. We found that the translators simply
translated sentences preserving their English language structure. This
caused the resulting Bengali sentences awkward and artificial to read.
For example, we do not write If x then y in Bengali just by
replacing if and then with the corresponding Bengali words. But the
translators did that, apparently this is an artifact of using GTT.
3. Lack of follow up: When we found the above problems, naturally, we
asked the contributor to fix them. Got no reply. It is NOT the task of
volunteers to clean up the mess after the one-night-standish paid
translators. Given the small number of volunteers active at any given
moment, it will take enormous efforts in our part to go through these
articles and fix the punctuation, spelling, and grammar issues. Not to
mention the awkward language style used by the translators.
So, after getting a cold shoulder from the paid translators about
fixing their mess, we had to ban such edits outright. We didn't know
who was behind this, until the Wikimania talk from Google. Not that it
matters ... even now, we won't allow these half done and badly
translated articles on bengali wikipedia.
Bengali wikipedia is small (21k articles), but we do not want to
populate it overnight with badly translated content, some of which
won't even qualify as grammatically correct Bengali. While wikipedia
may be a perpetual work in progress, that does not mean we need to be
guinea-pigs of some careless experiments. So, our stance is, Thanks,
but NO Thanks!. Unless, of course, they can put enough commitment
into the translations and fix mistakes.
We welcome automation in translation, but not at the expense of
introducing incorrect and messy content on wikipedia. We'd rather stay
small and hand-craft than allow an experimental tool and unskilled
paid translators creating a big mess.
Thanks
Ragib (User:Ragib on en and bn)
--
Ragib Hasan, Ph.D
NSF Computing Innovation Fellow and
Assistant Research Scientist
Dept of Computer Science
Johns Hopkins University
3400 N Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218
Website:
http://www.ragibhasan.com
On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 2:12 AM, Shiju Alex shijualexonl...@gmail.com wrote:
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.
As far as I know only Tamil, Bengali, and Swahili Wikipedians have raised
their concerns about Google's project. But, does this means that other
communities are happy about Google efforts? If there is no active community
in a wikipedia how can we expect response from communities? If there is no
response from a community, does that mean that Google can hire some native
speakers and use machine translation to create articles
