Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-21 Thread Nikola Smolenski
Дана Saturday 13 June 2009 18:20:36 picus-viridis написа:
 IMHO automatic translations into Polish are useless, as they only allow
 rough orientation in the contents of an article. It concerns  not only

How is rough orientation in the contents of an article useless?

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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-21 Thread David Gerard
2009/6/21 Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.yu:
 Дана Saturday 13 June 2009 18:20:36 picus-viridis написа:

 IMHO automatic translations into Polish are useless, as they only allow
 rough orientation in the contents of an article. It concerns  not only

 How is rough orientation in the contents of an article useless?


It's not useless, but it's not all that useful. I find when
translating from other Wikipedias to add to the English version of an
article that it's the subtle and important details that get mashed to
uncertainty.


- d.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-21 Thread Mark Williamson
It also depends on the language pair. For Chinese to English, I
wouldn't even bother with such a process (having a machine translate
and then correct the errors); for Spanish to English I do this very
frequently and it's a great timesaver.

Mark

skype: node.ue



On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 7:05 AM, David Gerarddger...@gmail.com wrote:
 2009/6/21 Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.yu:
 Дана Saturday 13 June 2009 18:20:36 picus-viridis написа:

 IMHO automatic translations into Polish are useless, as they only allow
 rough orientation in the contents of an article. It concerns  not only

 How is rough orientation in the contents of an article useless?


 It's not useless, but it's not all that useful. I find when
 translating from other Wikipedias to add to the English version of an
 article that it's the subtle and important details that get mashed to
 uncertainty.


 - d.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-15 Thread Gerard Meijssen
Hoi,
The quality of the translations will vary. There are many reasons for it and
one of the things that will make a difference is the number of people using
the translate tool as a rough first pass. Once this is done, using the
translation functionality will help Google to improve the quality of the
code.

This has been said before, there is no news here. What is relevant however
is that in order to support the languages that have not been supported so
far, there is a need for people actually using this tool to build the
translation corpus that gets you this first pass functionality.

Translation is not something where a silver bullet will provide an instant
on - high quality experience and it is the languages that are currently not
supported that have the highest need for tools like this.
Thanks,
  GerardN

2009/6/13 picus-viridis picus-viri...@o2.pl

  Let me disagree. Hungarian is not in the same group by far, and the
  results make it possible to understand more than 50% of the text
  (sometimes I'd say above 90%). While this is far from proper
  translation it is by no means _useless_, since its obvious use is to
  understand a completely foreign text to some extents.
 

 IMHO automatic translations into Polish are useless, as they only allow
 rough orientation in the contents of an article. It concerns  not only
 translations from Hungarian (in which part of the words whose Polish
 counterparts were unknown to the automatic translator were left untranslated
 or translated into English), but even translations from German. (I was
 trying articles on the children's literature ;-)

 Picus viridis



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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-15 Thread Marcus Buck
Gerard Meijssen hett schreven:
 Hoi,
 The quality of the translations will vary. There are many reasons for it and
 one of the things that will make a difference is the number of people using
 the translate tool as a rough first pass. Once this is done, using the
 translation functionality will help Google to improve the quality of the
 code.

 This has been said before, there is no news here. What is relevant however
 is that in order to support the languages that have not been supported so
 far, there is a need for people actually using this tool to build the
 translation corpus that gets you this first pass functionality.

 Translation is not something where a silver bullet will provide an instant
 on - high quality experience and it is the languages that are currently not
 supported that have the highest need for tools like this.
This is interesting. I did not know it's possible to train new 
languages. Is there any available information on the requirements? What 
requirements need to be met, to make Google support them (so they can be 
selected in the drop-down at the translator toolkit)? _How much_ text do 
they need as a basis to finally enable the translation function?

(My personal experience with the collaboratetiveness of Google is a bad 
one. Although Google is a multi-billion dollar company and [in a fair 
world] should actually _pay_ people for things like translating their 
interface in as much languages as possible [as Google with its 80% 
search engine market share is one of the most important internet access 
vectors and not having a search engine in your language is a big 
accessibility barrier] they rather choose to go the cheap way and let 
volunteers translate it. That not enough, they have the chutzpa to 
_reject_ adding any further languages [no additions since at least 2007, 
although they still support Elmer Fudd, bork bork bork, Klingon and 
pirate speak...]. At the moment Google supports the languages of 
roundabout 85 to 90% of the world's population and it seems, they don't 
care about the rest.)

Marcus Buck

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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-15 Thread Gerard Meijssen
Hoi,
One of the most important things that is needed for adding languages to a
technology like this is having a sufficiently sized corpus. For general
availability, the expectation for the quality is quite high. To me this
seems to be one reason why Google did not add more languages. Another reason
why many corpora are not big enough is because of the problem of identifying
a text for the language it is written in. When you consider that a few years
ago I learned that only a small percentage of Internet content has the
metadata for the language that is used.. When you then consider that
something like 75% is actually wrong...

Given that Google actually supports MediaWiki, it may be that they are
willing to support our language. The problem however is that many of our
language have illegal and even wrong codes. The consequence is that it is
not obvious to just support our language. This issue will not be resolved
because people are under the impression that the community has the final
word about the names of our languages. This is naive as well as problematic
because it prevents the ease of the argument for Google to support our
languages..
Thanks,
  GerardM

2009/6/15 Marcus Buck m...@marcusbuck.org

 Gerard Meijssen hett schreven:
  Hoi,
  The quality of the translations will vary. There are many reasons for it
 and
  one of the things that will make a difference is the number of people
 using
  the translate tool as a rough first pass. Once this is done, using the
  translation functionality will help Google to improve the quality of the
  code.
 
  This has been said before, there is no news here. What is relevant
 however
  is that in order to support the languages that have not been supported so
  far, there is a need for people actually using this tool to build the
  translation corpus that gets you this first pass functionality.
 
  Translation is not something where a silver bullet will provide an
 instant
  on - high quality experience and it is the languages that are currently
 not
  supported that have the highest need for tools like this.
 This is interesting. I did not know it's possible to train new
 languages. Is there any available information on the requirements? What
 requirements need to be met, to make Google support them (so they can be
 selected in the drop-down at the translator toolkit)? _How much_ text do
 they need as a basis to finally enable the translation function?

 (My personal experience with the collaboratetiveness of Google is a bad
 one. Although Google is a multi-billion dollar company and [in a fair
 world] should actually _pay_ people for things like translating their
 interface in as much languages as possible [as Google with its 80%
 search engine market share is one of the most important internet access
 vectors and not having a search engine in your language is a big
 accessibility barrier] they rather choose to go the cheap way and let
 volunteers translate it. That not enough, they have the chutzpa to
 _reject_ adding any further languages [no additions since at least 2007,
 although they still support Elmer Fudd, bork bork bork, Klingon and
 pirate speak...]. At the moment Google supports the languages of
 roundabout 85 to 90% of the world's population and it seems, they don't
 care about the rest.)

 Marcus Buck

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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-15 Thread Marcus Buck
Gerard Meijssen hett schreven:
 Hoi,
 One of the most important things that is needed for adding languages to a
 technology like this is having a sufficiently sized corpus. For general
 availability, the expectation for the quality is quite high. To me this
 seems to be one reason why Google did not add more languages. Another reason
 why many corpora are not big enough is because of the problem of identifying
 a text for the language it is written in. When you consider that a few years
 ago I learned that only a small percentage of Internet content has the
 metadata for the language that is used.. When you then consider that
 something like 75% is actually wrong...

 Given that Google actually supports MediaWiki, it may be that they are
 willing to support our language. The problem however is that many of our
 language have illegal and even wrong codes. The consequence is that it is
 not obvious to just support our language. This issue will not be resolved
 because people are under the impression that the community has the final
 word about the names of our languages. This is naive as well as problematic
 because it prevents the ease of the argument for Google to support our
 languages..
 Thanks,
   GerardM
Your old ISO code hobby horse ;-) I guess, if Google wanted to, they 
would be able recognize the languages of our projects. Just like all our 
users do too.

 One of the most important things that is needed for adding languages to a
 technology like this is having a sufficiently sized corpus.
Yes, that was basically my main question: What is sufficiently? How much 
pages or MB of text? At least the order of magnitude.

Marcus Buck

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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-15 Thread Gerard Meijssen
Hoi,
The proper use of language codes is indeed a recurring theme. Calling it a
hobby horse gives the impression that it does not have a real world
application. It does have a real world application and one of the problems
with language is that it is truly hard to recognise  languages confidently.
Suggesting that Google can because of its size is too easy. I am sure they
would have if they could.
Thanks,
  GerardM

2009/6/15 Marcus Buck m...@marcusbuck.org

 Gerard Meijssen hett schreven:
  Hoi,
  One of the most important things that is needed for adding languages to a
  technology like this is having a sufficiently sized corpus. For general
  availability, the expectation for the quality is quite high. To me this
  seems to be one reason why Google did not add more languages. Another
 reason
  why many corpora are not big enough is because of the problem of
 identifying
  a text for the language it is written in. When you consider that a few
 years
  ago I learned that only a small percentage of Internet content has the
  metadata for the language that is used.. When you then consider that
  something like 75% is actually wrong...
 
  Given that Google actually supports MediaWiki, it may be that they are
  willing to support our language. The problem however is that many of our
  language have illegal and even wrong codes. The consequence is that it is
  not obvious to just support our language. This issue will not be
 resolved
  because people are under the impression that the community has the
 final
  word about the names of our languages. This is naive as well as
 problematic
  because it prevents the ease of the argument for Google to support our
  languages..
  Thanks,
GerardM
 Your old ISO code hobby horse ;-) I guess, if Google wanted to, they
 would be able recognize the languages of our projects. Just like all our
 users do too.

  One of the most important things that is needed for adding languages to a
  technology like this is having a sufficiently sized corpus.
 Yes, that was basically my main question: What is sufficiently? How much
 pages or MB of text? At least the order of magnitude.

 Marcus Buck

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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-15 Thread Marcus Buck
Gerard Meijssen hett schreven:
 Hoi,
 The proper use of language codes is indeed a recurring theme. Calling it a
 hobby horse gives the impression that it does not have a real world
 application. It does have a real world application and one of the problems
 with language is that it is truly hard to recognise  languages confidently.
 Suggesting that Google can because of its size is too easy. I am sure they
 would have if they could.
 Thanks,
   GerardM
   
Let's assume Google wants to build an Alemannic translation tool. They 
are searching for an Alemannic text corpus. Will they fail to find the 
Alemannic Wikipedia cause 'als' stands for a form of Albanian? I don't 
think so.

Don't understand me wrong, I am _pro_ the use of correct codes and I 
would reject the opinion, that projects have the right to decide to 
stick to a wrong code. But I also reject to switch projects to codes 
that don't match the project ('gsw' for example is no proper substitute 
for 'als') and I reject code switches that do harm to the projects (that 
means that the old code has to be a redirect to the new code at least 
for several years).
And most importantly I think, that the question of ISO codes is not 
related to Google's operations. If Google wants to use Wikipedia content 
to improve their tools it should be really easy for them to do the code 
mapping (e.g. 'no'-'nb').


So does anybody know how big a corpus must be to be helpful to Google?

Marcus Buck

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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-15 Thread John at Darkstar
It depends on how much a priori knowledge you have about the languages.
For the moment people tend to go into two camps, those who want to use
statistical engines and those who want to go for rule based engines.
According to one person there are some activity to include rules into
statistical engines and vica verca but it still needs a lot of work.

Identifying a language isn't that difficult in itself, most search
engines are quite good at that. Many engines can even be told to
interpret the text according to a specific language so the problem is
basically non existent for us.

Still, because our articles has a lot of text that isn't part of a
single language, and in addition there are also specialized markup,
there should be done some kind of parsing before the translation engine
starts processing the text.

After some discussions last winter I am quite sure a rule based engine
work best for small languages, but that a working solution should use
some kind of self learning mechanism to refine the translation or at
least identify errors.

Our idea was to use statistics to identify cases where existing rules
failed, and let people define the new rules. Failing rules would be
detected by checking which translated sentences got changed afterwards.
Actually it is a bit more difficult than this,.. ;)

And no, I'm not a linguist...

John

 One of the most important things that is needed for adding languages to a
 technology like this is having a sufficiently sized corpus.
 Yes, that was basically my main question: What is sufficiently? How much
 pages or MB of text? At least the order of magnitude.

 Marcus Buck

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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-15 Thread Mark Williamson
Actually, Google added... Pirate and Montenegrin.

Mark


On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 4:43 AM, Marcus Buckm...@marcusbuck.org wrote:
 Gerard Meijssen hett schreven:
 Hoi,
 The quality of the translations will vary. There are many reasons for it and
 one of the things that will make a difference is the number of people using
 the translate tool as a rough first pass. Once this is done, using the
 translation functionality will help Google to improve the quality of the
 code.

 This has been said before, there is no news here. What is relevant however
 is that in order to support the languages that have not been supported so
 far, there is a need for people actually using this tool to build the
 translation corpus that gets you this first pass functionality.

 Translation is not something where a silver bullet will provide an instant
 on - high quality experience and it is the languages that are currently not
 supported that have the highest need for tools like this.
 This is interesting. I did not know it's possible to train new
 languages. Is there any available information on the requirements? What
 requirements need to be met, to make Google support them (so they can be
 selected in the drop-down at the translator toolkit)? _How much_ text do
 they need as a basis to finally enable the translation function?

 (My personal experience with the collaboratetiveness of Google is a bad
 one. Although Google is a multi-billion dollar company and [in a fair
 world] should actually _pay_ people for things like translating their
 interface in as much languages as possible [as Google with its 80%
 search engine market share is one of the most important internet access
 vectors and not having a search engine in your language is a big
 accessibility barrier] they rather choose to go the cheap way and let
 volunteers translate it. That not enough, they have the chutzpa to
 _reject_ adding any further languages [no additions since at least 2007,
 although they still support Elmer Fudd, bork bork bork, Klingon and
 pirate speak...]. At the moment Google supports the languages of
 roundabout 85 to 90% of the world's population and it seems, they don't
 care about the rest.)

 Marcus Buck

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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-15 Thread Marcus Buck
Mark Williamson hett schreven:
 Actually, Google added... Pirate and Montenegrin.

 Mark
I first asked them in 2007 to add my language. They told me, no further 
languages would be added at the moment and they would inform me, if that 
changed. I asked them again in 2008 and 2009. One time they answered not 
at all and the other time they said nothing had changed.
Pirate of course is an important addition... And Montenegrin surely was 
a good measure to endear oneself to the Montenegrin government.

Marcus Buck

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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-10 Thread Bennó
Let me agree with it completely (out of the shadow ;). This feature's aim is
obviously to help understand totally alien texts to a certain [at least
minimal?] extent. This whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with
'translation/interpretation' in it's proper sense. It's a pair of crutches
for those, who are otherwise helpless. ;) 

B.

-Original Message-
From: foundation-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Peter Gervai
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 1:28 PM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with
humantranslations of Wikipedia articles

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 00:54, mastimast...@gmail.com wrote:
 current level of sophistication of translation tools, especialy of 
 languages that do not belog to the same group as english, german, 
 french, etc. is completely useless.

Let me disagree. Hungarian is not in the same group by far, and the results
make it possible to understand more than 50% of the text (sometimes I'd say
above 90%). While this is far from proper translation it is by no means
_useless_, since its obvious use is to understand a completely foreign text
to some extents.

And I'd like to second that the quality has been really improving, whether
the state of the art linguistic science backs its theory up or not. This is
observation, and not theory.

But I see this is an exaggeration contest, so I'll go back to the shadow.
:-)

grin

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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-10 Thread Bence Damokos
What I see as a great feature in the toolkit is the translation memory: in
practice (after you switch of the machine translation), common phrases in
Wikipedia articles - like external links, notes, history, early life
etc. - are pretranslated once a human has already translated them; if more
then one people start working on the same article separately, they can make
use of the other users' translations and build upon them (without having to
explicitly 'collaborate' or 'share' for this function to work).

Also, if you were to translate [[Bird species 1]], [[Bird species 2]],
[[Bird species 3]], I think you would get some very useful suggestions for
translating [[Bird species 4]].

Best,
Bence Damokos

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 1:38 PM, Bennó benn...@freemail.hu wrote:

 and totally alien texts to a certain [at least
 minimal?] extent. This whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with
 'translation/interpretation' in it's proper sense. It's a pair of crutches
 for those, who are otherwise helpless. ;)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-10 Thread Amir E. Aharoni
On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 14:46, Bence Damokosbdamo...@gmail.com wrote:
 What I see as a great feature in the toolkit is the translation memory: in
 practice (after you switch of the machine translation), common phrases in
 Wikipedia articles - like external links, notes, history, early life
 etc. - are pretranslated once a human has already translated them; if more
 then one people start working on the same article separately, they can make
 use of the other users' translations and build upon them (without having to
 explicitly 'collaborate' or 'share' for this function to work).

Maybe, but at the very best case it can work for very short passages.
Two or three sentences at most. And it would be taken out of context.

-- 
אמיר אלישע אהרוני
Amir Elisha Aharoni

http://aharoni.wordpress.com

We're living in pieces,
 I want to live in peace. - T. Moore

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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-10 Thread Bence Damokos
On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@gmail.comwrote:

 On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 14:46, Bence Damokosbdamo...@gmail.com wrote:
  What I see as a great feature in the toolkit is the translation memory:
 in
  practice (after you switch of the machine translation), common phrases in
  Wikipedia articles - like external links, notes, history, early
 life
  etc. - are pretranslated once a human has already translated them; if
 more
  then one people start working on the same article separately, they can
 make
  use of the other users' translations and build upon them (without having
 to
  explicitly 'collaborate' or 'share' for this function to work).

 Maybe, but at the very best case it can work for very short passages.
 Two or three sentences at most. And it would be taken out of context.


If you were working on the very same article, it would obviously be in
context...; and the short phrases tend to be common, especially, considering
that Google treats the target of the links separately which allows for
creating a sort of glossary.

Best,
Bence
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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-10 Thread Ray Saintonge
Bennó wrote:
 Let me agree with it completely (out of the shadow ;). This feature's aim is
 obviously to help understand totally alien texts to a certain [at least
 minimal?] extent. This whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with
 'translation/interpretation' in it's proper sense. It's a pair of crutches
 for those, who are otherwise helpless. ;) 

   
Sure, but even with 90% accuracy (which is still very low) one needs to 
remain aware of the limitations of machine translation.  Seeing it as a 
crutch is a healthy approach.  What needs to be discouraged is the 
dangerous techno-pop attitude that there is a machine solution for every 
situation, and that machines can find the magic substitute for common sense.

Ec

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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-10 Thread Brian
I would just like to point out that every single critic has ignored the
premise that I started this thread with:

This is a great example of machines helping people help machines help
people.

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 10:53 AM, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote:

 Bennó wrote:
  Let me agree with it completely (out of the shadow ;). This feature's aim
 is
  obviously to help understand totally alien texts to a certain [at least
  minimal?] extent. This whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with
  'translation/interpretation' in it's proper sense. It's a pair of
 crutches
  for those, who are otherwise helpless. ;)
 
 
 Sure, but even with 90% accuracy (which is still very low) one needs to
 remain aware of the limitations of machine translation.  Seeing it as a
 crutch is a healthy approach.  What needs to be discouraged is the
 dangerous techno-pop attitude that there is a machine solution for every
 situation, and that machines can find the magic substitute for common
 sense.

 Ec

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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-10 Thread Ray Saintonge
Brian wrote:
 I would just like to point out that every single critic has ignored the
 premise that I started this thread with:

 This is a great example of machines helping people help machines help
 people.

   

I don't disagree with that point, but I often note in real life that 
many people who seek help want to substitute that help for any exercise 
of their own little grey cells.

I have no problem with using a machine translation as a starting point 
because these translations are uncopyrightable beyond pre-existing 
copyrights.

Ec

 On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 10:53 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
   
 Sure, but even with 90% accuracy (which is still very low) one needs to
 remain aware of the limitations of machine translation.  Seeing it as a
 crutch is a healthy approach.  What needs to be discouraged is the
 dangerous techno-pop attitude that there is a machine solution for every
 situation, and that machines can find the magic substitute for common
 sense.

 Ec
 


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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with humantranslations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-10 Thread Amir E. Aharoni
On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 20:01, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote:
 I would just like to point out that every single critic has ignored the
 premise that I started this thread with:

 This is a great example of machines helping people help machines help
 people.

That, again, would be Wikipedia, not Google. No-one knows how these
Google algorithms work, so i can't really know how helpful i am.

-- 
אמיר אלישע אהרוני
Amir Elisha Aharoni

http://aharoni.wordpress.com

We're living in pieces,
 I want to live in peace. - T. Moore

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