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

2009-06-12 Thread Gordon Joly


FYI,


Don't know if this is relevant


Gordo





From: Allen Gunn gun...@aspirationtech.org
To: icomm...@lists.ibiblio.org icomm...@lists.ibiblio.org
X-Enigmail-Version: 0.95.7
Subject: [Icommons] Open Translation Tools 2009 - Call for Participants




Howdy iCommons friends,

If you are involved with the open source tools and distributed processes
behind the translation of open content, we'd love you to consider
joining us in Amsterdam in late June for Open Translation Tools 2009.

And please help us spread the word to those who might be interested -
blog it, post it to other lists, tweet it, Facebook it. We thank you for
your help in bringing together people passionate about the translation
of open knowledge.

And a shout-out to Ahrash Bissell, who has been wonderfully supportive
in helping us shape the vision for the event.

Full event blurbage is pasted below, and also available at

http://www.aspirationtech.org/events/opentranslation/2009

We hope to see you in Amsterdam at the end of June!

thanks  peace,
gunner

-

Open Translation Tools 2009 - Call for Participants!

http://www.aspirationtech.org/events/opentranslation/2009

Aspiration is delighted to announce Open Translation Tools 2009 (OTT09),
to be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, from 22-24 June, 2009. The
event will be followed by an Open Translation Book Sprint which will
produce a first-of-its-kind volume on tools and best practices in the
field of Open Translation. Both events are being co-organized in
partnership with FLOSSManuals.net and Translate.org.za, and generously
supported by the Open Society Institute.

Agenda partners for the event include Creative Commons, Global Voices
Online, WorldWide Lexicon, Meedan, and DotSUB.

OTT09 will build upon the work and collaboration from Open Translation
Tools 2007 (http://www.aspirationtech.org/events/opentranslation). The
event will convene stakeholders in the field of open content translation
to assess the state of software tools that support translation of
content that is licensed under free or open content licenses such as
Creative Commons or Free Document License. The event will serve to map
out what's available, what's missing, who's doing what, and to recommend
strategic next steps to address those needs, with a particular focus on
delivering value to open education, open knowledge, and human rights
blogging communities.

Primary focus will be placed on supporting and enabling distributed
human translation of content, but the role of machine translation will
also be considered. Open content will encompass a range of resource
types, from educational materials to books to manuals to documents to
blog content to video and multimedia.

We invite all prospective participants to answer the Open Translation
2009 Call for Participants.

The agenda goals of the 2009 event will be several:

* Addressing the Translation Challenges Faced by the Open Education,
Open Content, and human rights blogging communities, and mapping
requirements to available open solutions.
* Building on the vision and exploring new use cases for the Global
Voices Lingua Translation Exchange
* Documenting the state of the art in distributed human translation, and
discussing how to further tap the tremendous translation potential of
the net
* Making tools talk better: realizing a standards-driven approach to
open translation
* Exploring and sketching out Open Translation API Designs, building on
existing work and models
* Documenting workflow requirements for missing open translation tools
* Match-making between open source tools and open content projects
* Mapping of available tools to open translation use cases

See the Agenda Overview
(http://www.aspirationtech.org/events/opentranslation/2009/agenda/overview)
for elaboration and more details about what is being planned.

Most importantly, the agenda will center on the needs and knowledge of
the participating projects, structuring sessions and collaborations to
focus on designing appropriate processes and selecting appropriate tools
to support open content projects and inform further development of open
source translation tools.

In addition, OTT09 will continue the knowledge sharing for the open
translation community, and continue discussion on other identified needs
from OTT07. The agenda for this event will be greatly informed by open
education, open content and human rights blogging projects with specific
translation needs, and a number of sessions will be structured to both
characterize requirements and propose solutions to respective projects'
translation requirements.

OTT07 mapped out a hefty list Open Translation Tools
(http://www.aspirationtech.org/papers/ott07/tools). Participants at
OTT09 will survey what has changed over the past 18 months, and assess
the most pressing remaining gaps.

If OTT09 sounds like your kind of event, we invite you to answer the
Open Translation 2009 Call for Participants!


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

2009-06-11 Thread John at Darkstar
Compare such text to a photo of a painting changed by some automatic
algorithm. The copyright of the painting is unchanged and the algorithm
gets no part of any new copyright, yet the person applying the tool
_can_ have a part in the copyright for the new derived work.

If you translate a work through the use of some tool, the tool gets no
part of the copyright, the person may get a part of the copyright for
the derived work but then he must do something in addition to running
the tool, unless the tool is so extremely difficult to use that running
it is sufficient.

John

John at Darkstar skrev:
 Machine translations are not new work, neither derivatives, as it is
 done by machines and not by humans.
 
 Also Google will have a hard time claiming that because some
 unidentified person added text or an url to a open service they now has
 the right to do whatever they want with the text.
 
 I guess what they try to say in the TOS is that the text will be used to
 build the statistical engine and you give Google the right to do so.
 That is, they provide the translation and you provide the corrections
 which is then released to them.
 
 John
 
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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with human translations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-11 Thread Brian
On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 11:57 PM, John at Darkstar vac...@jeb.no wrote:

 Machine translations are not new work, neither derivatives, as it is
 done by machines and not by humans.


This is probably the correct argument to make.
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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with human translations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-11 Thread John at Darkstar
There are two trends in machine translations; rule based translations
and statistical translations. Both have pros and cons. Rule based
translations seems to be possible to integrate with Wiktionary in such a
way that it can support Wikipedia. Statistical translations seems to be
possible to integrate more directly with Wikipedia. Both methods can use
the history of the translated article to identify where the translation
engine fails; for a rule based translation engine that usually means
there are some missing transfer rules, for a statistical translation
engine that means the engine has failed to adapt to some type of sentence.

Google previously used Systrans engine, but now uses their own. Sort of,
there are some rumors about them using a open source statistical
translation engine.
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/10/google-translate-switches-to-googles.html

Microsoft also uses a statistical translation engine.
http://blogs.msdn.com/translation/archive/2008/08/22/statistical-machine-translation-guest-blog.aspx

One very promising free rule based translation engine is Apertium
http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Main_Page

A very well known free statistical engine is Moses
http://www.statmt.org/moses/



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

2009-06-11 Thread John at Darkstar
Sorry for my english, its actually not a machine translation even if it
looks like that! ;p

John

John at Darkstar skrev:
 There are two trends in machine translations; rule based translations
 and statistical translations. Both have pros and cons. Rule based
 translations seems to be possible to integrate with Wiktionary in such a
 way that it can support Wikipedia. Statistical translations seems to be
 possible to integrate more directly with Wikipedia. Both methods can use
 the history of the translated article to identify where the translation
 engine fails; for a rule based translation engine that usually means
 there are some missing transfer rules, for a statistical translation
 engine that means the engine has failed to adapt to some type of sentence.
 
 Google previously used Systrans engine, but now uses their own. Sort of,
 there are some rumors about them using a open source statistical
 translation engine.
 http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/10/google-translate-switches-to-googles.html
 
 Microsoft also uses a statistical translation engine.
 http://blogs.msdn.com/translation/archive/2008/08/22/statistical-machine-translation-guest-blog.aspx
 
 One very promising free rule based translation engine is Apertium
 http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Main_Page
 
 A very well known free statistical engine is Moses
 http://www.statmt.org/moses/
 
 
 
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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with human translations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-11 Thread Amir E. Aharoni
On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 09:37, John at Darkstarvac...@jeb.no wrote:
 Google previously used Systrans engine, but now uses their own. Sort of,
 there are some rumors about them using a open source statistical
 translation engine.
 http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/10/google-translate-switches-to-googles.html

I couldn't find those rumors at the link you gave. Where did you see them?

That would be interesting. If it is open source, Wikipedia can just
use it, and more importantly - improve it, by itself, without Google's
help

-- 
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 human translations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-11 Thread John at Darkstar
The link is about Google Translate, I'm not sure about the rumor.

Probably a rule based solution is the easiest to get up and running for
small wikis, while a statistical solution will work for larger wikis.
That will make the system work sufficiently well that users will build
upon the initial machine translation thereby enabling the statistical
engine to learn from the errors. Its like an automatic classifier with
some a priori knowledge.

John

Amir E. Aharoni skrev:
 On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 09:37, John at Darkstarvac...@jeb.no wrote:
 Google previously used Systrans engine, but now uses their own. Sort of,
 there are some rumors about them using a open source statistical
 translation engine.
 http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/10/google-translate-switches-to-googles.html
 
 I couldn't find those rumors at the link you gave. Where did you see them?
 
 That would be interesting. If it is open source, Wikipedia can just
 use it, and more importantly - improve it, by itself, without Google's
 help
 

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

2009-06-10 Thread Lars Aronsson
Brian wrote:

 In the absence of a sentence aligned corpus one must be created.

It would be nice if such a corpus (or rather, the resulting 
dictionary of translated words, phrases and sentences) could also 
be open content.  Are you in talks with Google about this, 
Brian?  Would they be interested in providing open content output 
in exchange for open content input?


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (l...@aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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

2009-06-10 Thread Brian
In talks with Google? Oh I wish ;)

There are lots of algorithms that do sentence alignment automatically. The
different language articles don't have to be identical for Google to align
them. So we've basically already got what they've got in terms of Wikipedia
data.

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 1:05 AM, Lars Aronsson l...@aronsson.se wrote:

 Brian wrote:

  In the absence of a sentence aligned corpus one must be created.

 It would be nice if such a corpus (or rather, the resulting
 dictionary of translated words, phrases and sentences) could also
 be open content.  Are you in talks with Google about this,
 Brian?  Would they be interested in providing open content output
 in exchange for open content input?


 --
  Lars Aronsson (l...@aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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

2009-06-10 Thread geni
2009/6/10 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu:
 Not only did you not provide a critique of my more general claim (that the
 user does not enter into a contract with Google regarding Wikipedia's data)
 but you have no provided any sort of well founded critique of this one.
 You've basically said, in both cases, I don't believe that.



Thatys because you've provided zero evidence to back your position.
Have you even rad the TOS:

By using Google Translator Toolkit (the “Service”), you agree to be
bound by our Google Terms of Services located at
http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS as well as these additional terms.

1. Your relationship with Google

1.1 Your use of Google’s products, software, services and web
sites (referred to collectively as the “Services” in this document and
excluding any services provided to you by Google under a separate
written agreement) is subject to the terms of a legal agreement
between you and Google. 

2.1 In order to use the Services, you must firstly agree to the
Terms. You may not use the Services if you do not accept the Terms.

2.3 You may not use the Services and may not accept the Terms if (a)
you are not of legal age to form a binding contract with Google, or
(b) you are a person barred from receiving the Services under the laws
of the United States or other countries including the country in which
you are resident or from which you use the Services.



. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a
perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive
licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly
perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit,
post or display on or through, the Services.


If if we took your highly non standard position that providing Google
with a URL is not submitting the content the output is displayed by
Google and you have no way to grant them the above rights over it for
third party CC-BY-SA content.


-- 
geni

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

2009-06-10 Thread Amir E. Aharoni
On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 23:42, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote:
 Google has built in support for using its machine translation technology to
 help bootstrap human translations of Wikipedia articles.

 http://translate.google.com/toolkit/docupload

 The benefit to Google is clear - they need sentence-aligned text in multiple
 languages in order to bootstrap their automated system.

 This is a great example of machines helping people help machines help
 people, etc... I'm sure this is now the most efficient way to produce high
 quality translations of Wikipedia articles en masse.

 We should take the ToS to make sure the translated text can be CC-BY-SA
 licensed.

OK, after a bit of drama in this discussion, i actually tried this toolkit.

First i tried to translate the Hebrew article [[שלום גד]] into English
(that's Shalom Gad, one of my favorite Israeli musicians). Apparently,
it can only translate from English. I am more interested in
translating Wikipedia articles from Hebrew into English, so it was
quite disappointing, but they'll probably fix it soon enough.

Then i tried to translate [[Art critic]] from English into Hebrew.
There were a few pleasant surprises, but on the whole the machine
translation was bad to the point of being unusable. It is much easier
to translate it using vi.

Google want side by side translations. It is not quite possible. A
grammar of a language is not just subjects, objects, tenses and
adjectives. Google seem to ignore [[Text linguistics]] - rules which
apply way beyond the word and the sentence. And these are *grammar
rules*, not just style. (Disclaimer: The Department of Linguistics
in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where i study, is very keen on
this subject.)

I *had* to make very deep changes to paragraph structure - not to
mention sentence structure -, and not just because the Hebrew
Wikipedia has a different MOS, but because it's the basis of the
Hebrew language. A text without these changes would be next to
unreadable. I doubt that a document which is changed so deeply is very
useful to Google at this point. I certainly know that it is not useful
to me - i gave up after two paragraphs.

So yes, Google can revise the legalese of their TOS, but this is not a
very urgent problem. The uselessness of the technology makes the TOS
pretty irrelevant.

-- 
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 human translations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-10 Thread Peter Gervai
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 human translations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-10 Thread Nikola Smolenski
Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
 On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 23:42, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote:
 Google has built in support for using its machine translation technology to
 help bootstrap human translations of Wikipedia articles.

 http://translate.google.com/toolkit/docupload

 The benefit to Google is clear - they need sentence-aligned text in multiple
 languages in order to bootstrap their automated system.

 This is a great example of machines helping people help machines help
 people, etc... I'm sure this is now the most efficient way to produce high
 quality translations of Wikipedia articles en masse.

 We should take the ToS to make sure the translated text can be CC-BY-SA
 licensed.
 
 OK, after a bit of drama in this discussion, i actually tried this toolkit.
 
 Then i tried to translate [[Art critic]] from English into Hebrew.
 There were a few pleasant surprises, but on the whole the machine
 translation was bad to the point of being unusable. It is much easier
 to translate it using vi.

I tried translating [[Astronomy]] and [[Eothyrididae]] (at least, the 
part of it that is in English) to Serbian and was pleasantly surprised. 
Sure, literally every sentence needed major corrections, but for me it 
was still much easier to do that than to translate from scratch.

 I *had* to make very deep changes to paragraph structure - not to
 mention sentence structure -, and not just because the Hebrew
 Wikipedia has a different MOS, but because it's the basis of the

This is then apparently the case of English→Hebrew translation working 
worse than English→Serbian (possibly due to Hebrew being a 
non-indo-european language)? I have never had to make any changes to 
paragraph structure, only occasionally changes to sentence structure 
(I'd say there were about 10% of sentences I had to change the structure 
of and another 10% that had uncommon structure but I let them slide).

  Hebrew language. A text without these changes would be next to
 unreadable. I doubt that a document which is changed so deeply is very

While I would probably delete an article that would be dumped straight 
from a machine translation, I still find it fully understandable.

To illustrate:

Then i tried to translate [[Art critic]] from English into Hebrew.
There were a few pleasant surprises, but on the whole the machine
translation was bad to the point of being unusable. It is much easier
to translate it using vi.

translates to:

Tada sam pokušao prevesti [[umetnički kritičar]] sa engleskog na hebrejskom.
Bilo je nekoliko ugodnih iznenađenja, nego na ceo mašina
prevod je loš do tačke da je neupotrebljiva. To je mnogo lakše
prevesti preko VI.

I would retranslate this to broken English li:

Then i tried to translate [[Art critic]] from English into Hebrew's.
There were a few pleasant surprises, than on entire machine's
translation was bad to the point of being unusably. Much easier 
translated via VI.

and the correct would be (I highlighted the changes):

Tada sam pokušao prevesti [[umetnički kritičar]] sa engleskog na 
*hebrejski*.
Bilo je nekoliko ugodnih iznenađenja, *ali u celini* *mašinski*
prevod je loš do tačke da je *neupotrebljiv*. *Mnogo je* lakše
prevesti *ga* *pomoću vi-ja*.

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

2009-06-10 Thread Yaroslav M. Blanter
 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.

 Machine translations into slavic languages are to be deleted from wiki
 immediatealy.

 masti

Just to confirm, yesterday I needed to translate a piece from Bulgariam
Wikipedia article into Russian. I ended up with the manual translation
even though I do no speak a word of Bulgarian (Russian is my
mothertongue). The output of Google Language Tools (Bulgarian into
English) was on substandard level.

Cheers
Yaroslav


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

2009-06-10 Thread Amir E. Aharoni
On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 06:22, David Goodmandgoodma...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 6:01 PM, Amir E. Aharoniamir.ahar...@gmail.com wrote:

 An unedited machine-translated text is likely to be speedily deleted
 as patent nonsense, before copyvio is even considered.

 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.

According to the dry letter of the policies it may be an error, but
the deletion logs show that it happens quite often.

-- 
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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 human translations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-10 Thread Kalan
Such an approach has an critical flaw. I don’t know whether this
applies to, say, English—French translations, but it is known to be
present for cyrillic languages. Statistical approach sometimes
discovers false connections that result in factual errors. Examples of
“translating”, say, “50 USD” as “50 000 UAH” within a particular
context are known; more of such things can arise unexpectedly. So, at
least a good understanding both of the topic and the source language
is a crucial prerequisite, and there should be a warning about it.

I really don’t like the way they write “Wikipedia™” instead of simply
“Wikipedia” — do they really have to emphasize the trademark status?

Perhaps, after some time goes by, I will be able to make a tool to
select all translations made that way on a wiki, which may help
deleting purely nonsensical ones.

— Kalan

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

2009-06-10 Thread Nikola Smolenski
Kalan wrote:
 present for cyrillic languages. Statistical approach sometimes
 discovers false connections that result in factual errors. Examples of
 “translating”, say, “50 USD” as “50 000 UAH” within a particular
 context are known; more of such things can arise unexpectedly. So, at

The funniest example I noticed is that flew was translated to Serbian 
as MaudDib :) (this has been corrected since).

And yet I can not stress enough how much I find this service useful, 
both for personal use and to ease translation.

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

2009-06-10 Thread Amir E. Aharoni
On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 19:29, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote:
 Of course these are now things that you are able to fix and which can be
 shared with everyone.

Unfortunately it's Google, not Wikipedia. There's mysterious Google
code behind it all; not MediaWiki, whose code everyone is free to
study and fix.

Not evil - just mysterious. And overhyped.

-- 
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 human translations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-10 Thread Nikola Smolenski
Дана Wednesday 10 June 2009 17:32:00 Mark Williamson написа:
 Ljubljana was translated to English in earlier phases of the
 software as rape... In Italian to English, L'Italia became

Well that is a correct translation :)

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

2009-06-10 Thread Mark Williamson
Thanks Nikola, I just laughed enough to last me for the rest of the week.

Mark



On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 9:49 AM, Nikola Smolenskismole...@eunet.yu wrote:
 Дана Wednesday 10 June 2009 17:32:00 Mark Williamson написа:
 Ljubljana was translated to English in earlier phases of the
 software as rape... In Italian to English, L'Italia became

 Well that is a correct translation :)

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

2009-06-10 Thread Ray Saintonge
Brian wrote:
 Of course these are now things that you are able to fix and which can be
 shared with everyone.
   

Sure, the funny errors are the most obvious and most easily fixed.  The 
problematic ones are more subtle, remain unnoticed, and more readily 
spread misunderstanding.

Ec
 On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 9:32 AM, Mark Williamson node...@gmail.com wrote:
   
 Sometimes cities are translated - Koper was translated to English
 from Slovene as Chicago and Kranj as Miami... of course Kranj is
 100km inland and Miami is largely beachfront and the opposite with
 Chicago and Koper.
 


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

2009-06-10 Thread John at Darkstar
Machine translations are not new work, neither derivatives, as it is
done by machines and not by humans.

Also Google will have a hard time claiming that because some
unidentified person added text or an url to a open service they now has
the right to do whatever they want with the text.

I guess what they try to say in the TOS is that the text will be used to
build the statistical engine and you give Google the right to do so.
That is, they provide the translation and you provide the corrections
which is then released to them.

John

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

2009-06-09 Thread Amir E. Aharoni
On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 23:42, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote:
 Google has built in support for using its machine translation technology to
 help bootstrap human translations of Wikipedia articles.

 http://translate.google.com/toolkit/docupload

 The benefit to Google is clear - they need sentence-aligned text in multiple
 languages in order to bootstrap their automated system.

 This is a great example of machines helping people help machines help
 people, etc... I'm sure this is now the most efficient way to produce high
 quality translations of Wikipedia articles en masse.

 We should take the ToS to make sure the translated text can be CC-BY-SA
 licensed.

Machine translation in its current status is so useless for anything
beyond ordering Opera Garnier tickets, that the copyright status of
its output is not quite relevant and i don't expect this to change in
the next fifty years.

-- 
אמיר אלישע אהרוני

heb: http://haharoni.wordpress.com | eng: http://aharoni.wordpress.com
cat: http://aprenent.wordpress.com | rus: http://amire80.livejournal.com

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 I want to live in peace. - T. Moore

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

2009-06-09 Thread Brian
On what basis do you make this extremely negative assessment?

Readability is the the same thing as ability to read.

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 3:13 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@gmail.comwrote:

 On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 23:42, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote:
  Google has built in support for using its machine translation technology
 to
  help bootstrap human translations of Wikipedia articles.
 
  http://translate.google.com/toolkit/docupload
 
  The benefit to Google is clear - they need sentence-aligned text in
 multiple
  languages in order to bootstrap their automated system.
 
  This is a great example of machines helping people help machines help
  people, etc... I'm sure this is now the most efficient way to produce
 high
  quality translations of Wikipedia articles en masse.
 
  We should take the ToS to make sure the translated text can be CC-BY-SA
  licensed.

 Machine translation in its current status is so useless for anything
 beyond ordering Opera Garnier tickets, that the copyright status of
 its output is not quite relevant and i don't expect this to change in
 the next fifty years.

 --
 אמיר אלישע אהרוני

 heb: http://haharoni.wordpress.com | eng: http://aharoni.wordpress.com
 cat: http://aprenent.wordpress.com | rus: http://amire80.livejournal.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 human translations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-09 Thread Brian
Honestly, I should have learned by now to ignore comments like this. Google
is the leading world expert on machine translation and they think it's a
good idea. I understand why they think it's a good idea, you don't. You're
shooting straight from the gut.

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 3:13 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@gmail.comwrote:

 On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 23:42, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote:
  Google has built in support for using its machine translation technology
 to
  help bootstrap human translations of Wikipedia articles.
 
  http://translate.google.com/toolkit/docupload
 
  The benefit to Google is clear - they need sentence-aligned text in
 multiple
  languages in order to bootstrap their automated system.
 
  This is a great example of machines helping people help machines help
  people, etc... I'm sure this is now the most efficient way to produce
 high
  quality translations of Wikipedia articles en masse.
 
  We should take the ToS to make sure the translated text can be CC-BY-SA
  licensed.

 Machine translation in its current status is so useless for anything
 beyond ordering Opera Garnier tickets, that the copyright status of
 its output is not quite relevant and i don't expect this to change in
 the next fifty years.

 --
 אמיר אלישע אהרוני

 heb: http://haharoni.wordpress.com | eng: http://aharoni.wordpress.com
 cat: http://aprenent.wordpress.com | rus: http://amire80.livejournal.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 human translations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-09 Thread Chad
On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 5:26 PM, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote:
 Honestly, I should have learned by now to ignore comments like this. Google
 is the leading world expert on machine translation and they think it's a
 good idea. I understand why they think it's a good idea, you don't. You're
 shooting straight from the gut.

 On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 3:13 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@gmail.comwrote:

 On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 23:42, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote:
  Google has built in support for using its machine translation technology
 to
  help bootstrap human translations of Wikipedia articles.
 
  http://translate.google.com/toolkit/docupload
 
  The benefit to Google is clear - they need sentence-aligned text in
 multiple
  languages in order to bootstrap their automated system.
 
  This is a great example of machines helping people help machines help
  people, etc... I'm sure this is now the most efficient way to produce
 high
  quality translations of Wikipedia articles en masse.
 
  We should take the ToS to make sure the translated text can be CC-BY-SA
  licensed.

 Machine translation in its current status is so useless for anything
 beyond ordering Opera Garnier tickets, that the copyright status of
 its output is not quite relevant and i don't expect this to change in
 the next fifty years.

 --
 אמיר אלישע אהרוני

 heb: http://haharoni.wordpress.com | eng: http://aharoni.wordpress.com
 cat: http://aprenent.wordpress.com | rus: http://amire80.livejournal.com

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

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For what it's worth, Google's language tools have drastically improved
over the years. They're getting really good, honestly.

That all being said, they're not perfect and a machine translation is still
no substitute for a human translator.

-Chad

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

2009-06-09 Thread geni
2009/6/9 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu:
 Google has built in support for using its machine translation technology to
 help bootstrap human translations of Wikipedia articles.

 http://translate.google.com/toolkit/docupload

 The benefit to Google is clear - they need sentence-aligned text in multiple
 languages in order to bootstrap their automated system.

 This is a great example of machines helping people help machines help
 people, etc... I'm sure this is now the most efficient way to produce high
 quality translations of Wikipedia articles en masse.

 We should take the ToS to make sure the translated text can be CC-BY-SA
 licensed.

 /Brian

Under Google's TOS you cannot enter CC or GFDL produced by someone
else into the translation tool.

-- 
geni

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

2009-06-09 Thread Amir E. Aharoni
On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 00:26, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote:
 Honestly, I should have learned by now to ignore comments like this. Google
 is the leading world expert on machine translation and they think it's a
 good idea. I understand why they think it's a good idea, you don't. You're
 shooting straight from the gut.

Not quite - i am finishing a degree in Linguistics and i work as an
NLP programmer, so i know the field a little.

Google is the leading world expert in searching vast amounts of text
in English, a language with next to no morphology. They aren't as good
at searching in Hebrew, Spanish and Russian. And their translation
software doesn't even cover Persian, a language with a relatively
simple morphology.

Google appear to assume that the statistical approach to machine
translation is the only one that matters and that their leadership in
search technologies makes them the leaders in machine translation.
They are wrong. The statistical approach helps, but humans don't think
only statistically. The grammars of even the best-researched languages
- English, French, German - are ridiculously far from being described
completely. When i say grammar, i refer to the whole language
system: morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse analysis, typography,
prosody, phonology and more. We can't teach computers grammar, because
we don't really understand it ourselves, and without teaching
computers proper grammar, the statistical approach is very limited.

Google improved their translation software a little in the last couple
of years but they are many, many years away from being able to
translate a real text. Google translation paired with something like
[[Universal Networking Language]] or maybe OmegaWiki may yield better
results, but it will take many more years to complete. Of course,
something may change and Big Companies may start pouring a lot of
money into dictionary and grammar book writers. Until that happens,
expect improvements in machine translation to be Very Slow.

-- 
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 human translations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-09 Thread Brian
I thought there would be some caveat.

They might be willing to fix this for us. We'd want to contact the
translation team directly since they are the ones who created the interface
to Wikipedia.

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 3:54 PM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote:

 2009/6/9 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu:
  Google has built in support for using its machine translation technology
 to
  help bootstrap human translations of Wikipedia articles.
 
  http://translate.google.com/toolkit/docupload
 
  The benefit to Google is clear - they need sentence-aligned text in
 multiple
  languages in order to bootstrap their automated system.
 
  This is a great example of machines helping people help machines help
  people, etc... I'm sure this is now the most efficient way to produce
 high
  quality translations of Wikipedia articles en masse.
 
  We should take the ToS to make sure the translated text can be CC-BY-SA
  licensed.
 
  /Brian

 Under Google's TOS you cannot enter CC or GFDL produced by someone
 else into the translation tool.

 --
 geni

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

2009-06-09 Thread Amir E. Aharoni
On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 00:54, genigeni...@gmail.com wrote:
 2009/6/9 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu:
 We should take the ToS to make sure the translated text can be CC-BY-SA
 licensed.

 /Brian

 Under Google's TOS you cannot enter CC or GFDL produced by someone
 else into the translation tool.

Where exactly do the TOS say it? I couldn't find it.

They would never find out about it anyway. In the current state of
things, any machine-translated text has to be edited manually and thus
it is not very different from translating a text using a dictionary -
and i believe that a human translator doesn't have to pay per-word
royalties to the dictionary publisher.

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

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 human translations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-09 Thread Bence Damokos
I couldn't dwelve into the TOS, but as I see it you start with a GFDL text
and end up uploading a text directly to Wikipedia; which implies that Google
is okay with their text being used that way (you don't have to copy-paste,
google uploads the text for you, although it is saved under your username,
the edit summary and the text linking back to the oiginal soure article).
I guess, what's more interesting than adhering to Wikimedia's licensing
terms (which is implicit in the process) is what rights does Google gain to
your improved sentence-by-sentence translations. (They certainly use it as
translation suggestions, for one).

Best regards,
Bence Damokos

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 12:01 AM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@gmail.comwrote:

 On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 00:54, genigeni...@gmail.com wrote:
  2009/6/9 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu:
  We should take the ToS to make sure the translated text can be CC-BY-SA
  licensed.
 
  /Brian
 
  Under Google's TOS you cannot enter CC or GFDL produced by someone
  else into the translation tool.

 Where exactly do the TOS say it? I couldn't find it.

 They would never find out about it anyway. In the current state of
 things, any machine-translated text has to be edited manually and thus
 it is not very different from translating a text using a dictionary -
 and i believe that a human translator doesn't have to pay per-word
 royalties to the dictionary publisher.

 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

 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 human translations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-09 Thread Brian
This is a theory. Google has a different theory that is backed up by
results. The size of the sentence-aligned corpus determines the quality of
the translation. The algorithms are entirely secondary.

In the absence of a sentence aligned corpus one must be created. People want
good machine translations but such translations require people to first do
part of the work. It's a perfectly reasonable symbiotic relationship. There
is no reason to expect that this project 1) won't help Google and 2) won't
help Wikipedia.

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 3:57 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@gmail.comwrote:

 On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 00:26, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote:
  Honestly, I should have learned by now to ignore comments like this.
 Google
  is the leading world expert on machine translation and they think it's a
  good idea. I understand why they think it's a good idea, you don't.
 You're
  shooting straight from the gut.

 Not quite - i am finishing a degree in Linguistics and i work as an
 NLP programmer, so i know the field a little.

 Google is the leading world expert in searching vast amounts of text
 in English, a language with next to no morphology. They aren't as good
 at searching in Hebrew, Spanish and Russian. And their translation
 software doesn't even cover Persian, a language with a relatively
 simple morphology.

 Google appear to assume that the statistical approach to machine
 translation is the only one that matters and that their leadership in
 search technologies makes them the leaders in machine translation.
 They are wrong. The statistical approach helps, but humans don't think
 only statistically. The grammars of even the best-researched languages
 - English, French, German - are ridiculously far from being described
 completely. When i say grammar, i refer to the whole language
 system: morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse analysis, typography,
 prosody, phonology and more. We can't teach computers grammar, because
 we don't really understand it ourselves, and without teaching
 computers proper grammar, the statistical approach is very limited.

 Google improved their translation software a little in the last couple
 of years but they are many, many years away from being able to
 translate a real text. Google translation paired with something like
 [[Universal Networking Language]] or maybe OmegaWiki may yield better
 results, but it will take many more years to complete. Of course,
 something may change and Big Companies may start pouring a lot of
 money into dictionary and grammar book writers. Until that happens,
 expect improvements in machine translation to be Very Slow.

 --
 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 human translations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-09 Thread geni
2009/6/9 Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@gmail.com:
 On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 00:54, genigeni...@gmail.com wrote:
 2009/6/9 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu:
 We should take the ToS to make sure the translated text can be CC-BY-SA
 licensed.

 /Brian

 Under Google's TOS you cannot enter CC or GFDL produced by someone
 else into the translation tool.

 Where exactly do the TOS say it? I couldn't find it.


By submitting your content through the Service, you grant Google the
permission to use your content permanently to promote, improve or
offer the Services


By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a
perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive
licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly
perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit,
post or display on or through, the Services.


You can't grant those rights if the copyright is held by a third
party. As a result you can't feed someone elses CC or GFDL content
into the system. There are probably other issues but the TOS is
unclear.


-- 
geni

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

2009-06-09 Thread masti
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.

Machine translations into slavic languages are to be deleted from wiki 
immediatealy.

masti

W dniu 09.06.2009 22:42, Brian pisze:
 Google has built in support for using its machine translation technology to
 help bootstrap human translations of Wikipedia articles.

 http://translate.google.com/toolkit/docupload

 The benefit to Google is clear - they need sentence-aligned text in multiple
 languages in order to bootstrap their automated system.

 This is a great example of machines helping people help machines help
 people, etc... I'm sure this is now the most efficient way to produce high
 quality translations of Wikipedia articles en masse.

 We should take the ToS to make sure the translated text can be CC-BY-SA
 licensed.

 /Brian
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Re: [Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with human translations of Wikipedia articles

2009-06-09 Thread Brian
I don't agree with this interpretation. Google provides an interface whereby
the user enters the URL to a Wikipedia article and Google imports the text
into their own service. The user does no importing.

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 4:47 PM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote:

 2009/6/9 Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@gmail.com:
  On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 00:54, genigeni...@gmail.com wrote:
  2009/6/9 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu:
  We should take the ToS to make sure the translated text can be CC-BY-SA
  licensed.
 
  /Brian
 
  Under Google's TOS you cannot enter CC or GFDL produced by someone
  else into the translation tool.
 
  Where exactly do the TOS say it? I couldn't find it.
 

 By submitting your content through the Service, you grant Google the
 permission to use your content permanently to promote, improve or
 offer the Services


 By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a
 perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive
 licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly
 perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit,
 post or display on or through, the Services.


 You can't grant those rights if the copyright is held by a third
 party. As a result you can't feed someone elses CC or GFDL content
 into the system. There are probably other issues but the TOS is
 unclear.


 --
 geni

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

2009-06-09 Thread geni
2009/6/9 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu:
 I don't agree with this interpretation. Google provides an interface whereby
 the user enters the URL to a Wikipedia article and Google imports the text
 into their own service. The user does no importing.

I think the odds of you successfully arguing that that does not fall
under submitting are pretty much zilch. In any case there are likely
other issues but that is just the most straightforward one.



-- 
geni

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

2009-06-09 Thread geni
2009/6/9 masti mast...@gmail.com:
 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.

 Machine translations into slavic languages are to be deleted from wiki
 immediatealy.

 masti

Slavic is in the same group as English, French and German. They are
all Indo-European. There is no lower level of relation between French
(romance language) and English (germanic)


-- 
geni

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

2009-06-09 Thread Brian
In the absence of a specific argument against my argument, my argument holds
- Google imports the data into their own service and there is no
contradiction.

Suppose however that my argument did not hold - that when Google download's
data to their own servers on behalf of a user this section of the ToS
becomes a legally binding contract between Google and the user. Is there a
contradiction between the ToS and Wikipedia's copyright policy?

On the one hand we have Google's ToS which states that when a user imports
data they grant Google rights that, legally, the user cannot grant. On the
other hand Google has clearly created a service that is meant to assist
Wikipedian's in translating articles from one language to another so that
the data might be imported back into Wikipedia. The very existence of such a
service, created for the express purpose of operating on GFDL/CC-BY-SA text,
automatically voids the statement in the ToS because it is nonsensical. If
Google were to try to make a legal claim on the content, which they would
not, they would have no legal basis on which to do so.

Regardless, I started this thread as a PSA. As another user pointed out, no
one would ever know if someone used Google Translate to translate a
Wikipedia article, so the whole conversation is largely pointless.

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 5:03 PM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote:

 2009/6/9 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu:
  I don't agree with this interpretation. Google provides an interface
 whereby
  the user enters the URL to a Wikipedia article and Google imports the
 text
  into their own service. The user does no importing.

 I think the odds of you successfully arguing that that does not fall
 under submitting are pretty much zilch. In any case there are likely
 other issues but that is just the most straightforward one.



 --
 geni

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

2009-06-09 Thread Andre Engels
 On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 1:14 AM, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote:
 In the absence of a specific argument against my argument, my argument holds
 - Google imports the data into their own service and there is no
 contradiction.

 Suppose however that my argument did not hold - that when Google download's
 data to their own servers on behalf of a user this section of the ToS
 becomes a legally binding contract between Google and the user. Is there a
 contradiction between the ToS and Wikipedia's copyright policy?

 On the one hand we have Google's ToS which states that when a user imports
 data they grant Google rights that, legally, the user cannot grant. On the
 other hand Google has clearly created a service that is meant to assist
 Wikipedian's in translating articles from one language to another so that
 the data might be imported back into Wikipedia. The very existence of such a
 service, created for the express purpose of operating on GFDL/CC-BY-SA text,
 automatically voids the statement in the ToS because it is nonsensical. If
 Google were to try to make a legal claim on the content, which they would
 not, they would have no legal basis on which to do so.

I do not see your argument... There is a contract between Google and
the user, granting Google certain rights. Why does the fact that the
user (and/or Google) intends to use the material for something else
void this contract?

-- 
André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com

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

2009-06-09 Thread Brian
Google and the user entered into a completely different contract by agreeing
to operate on freely licensed content.

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 5:25 PM, Andre Engels andreeng...@gmail.com wrote:

  On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 1:14 AM, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote:
  In the absence of a specific argument against my argument, my argument
 holds
  - Google imports the data into their own service and there is no
  contradiction.
 
  Suppose however that my argument did not hold - that when Google
 download's
  data to their own servers on behalf of a user this section of the ToS
  becomes a legally binding contract between Google and the user. Is there
 a
  contradiction between the ToS and Wikipedia's copyright policy?
 
  On the one hand we have Google's ToS which states that when a user
 imports
  data they grant Google rights that, legally, the user cannot grant. On
 the
  other hand Google has clearly created a service that is meant to assist
  Wikipedian's in translating articles from one language to another so that
  the data might be imported back into Wikipedia. The very existence of
 such a
  service, created for the express purpose of operating on GFDL/CC-BY-SA
 text,
  automatically voids the statement in the ToS because it is nonsensical.
 If
  Google were to try to make a legal claim on the content, which they would
  not, they would have no legal basis on which to do so.

 I do not see your argument... There is a contract between Google and
 the user, granting Google certain rights. Why does the fact that the
 user (and/or Google) intends to use the material for something else
 void this contract?

 --
 André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com

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

2009-06-09 Thread geni
2009/6/10 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu:
 Google and the user entered into a completely different contract by agreeing
 to operate on freely licensed content.


Show me exactly where they entered into such an agreement.

Sane, non evil TOS service are not Google's strong point. Remember the
chrome mess?


-- 
geni

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

2009-06-09 Thread geni
2009/6/10 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu:
 You're choosing not to get it. I can't help that.


So you can't actually back up your assertion.

-- 
geni

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

2009-06-09 Thread Brian
Not only did you not provide a critique of my more general claim (that the
user does not enter into a contract with Google regarding Wikipedia's data)
but you have no provided any sort of well founded critique of this one.
You've basically said, in both cases, I don't believe that.

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 8:10 PM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote:

 2009/6/10 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu:
  You're choosing not to get it. I can't help that.


 So you can't actually back up your assertion.

 --
 geni

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

2009-06-09 Thread Judson Dunn
That's really neat, I'm glad they worked on Wikipedia first. I'm sure
they are open to working with the licensing issues, they seem to like
to use a rather restrictive one as their default almost without
thinking about it, which I think is what happened with chrome also.
I'm sure they will be open to changing it.

The tool itself looks really nice too!

Judson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cohesion

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

2009-06-09 Thread David Goodman
On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 6:01 PM, Amir E. Aharoniamir.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



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

2009-06-09 Thread Ray Saintonge
On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 3:13 PM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:


 Machine translation in its current status is so useless for anything
 beyond ordering Opera Garnier tickets, that the copyright status of
 its output is not quite relevant and i don't expect this to change in
 the next fifty years.
   
Brian wrote:
 On what basis do you make this extremely negative assessment?

 Readability is the the same thing as ability to read.

   
No, readability is the ability to BE read.

For the most part machine translation is rarely reliable, and often 
hilarious.

Ec

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