On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 4:26 PM, Denny Vrandečić <denny.vrande...@wikimedia.de> wrote: > Not just bootstrapping the content. By having the primary content be saved > in a language independent form, and always translating it on the fly, it > would not merely bootstrap content in different languages, but it would > mean that editors from different languages would be working on the same > content. The texts in the different language is not a translation of each > other, but they are all created from the same source. There would be no > primacy of, say, English.
What we can is to make Simple English Wikipedia more useful and rewrite rules from the Simple English language to the Controlled English language and to allow filling the content of the smaller Wikipedias from Simple English Wikipedia. That's the only way how to get anything more useful than Google Translate output. There are serious problems in relation to the "translation of translation" process and that kind of complexity is not in the range of contemporary science. (Basically, even good machine translation is not in in the range contemporary science. Statistical approaches are useful for getting basic understanding, but very bad for writing encyclopedia or anything else which requires correct output in the targeted language.) On a much simpler scale of conversion engines, we can see that even 1% of errors (or manual interventions) are serious issue for the text integrity, while translations of translations are creating much more errors, no matter would there be human interventions or not. And that's not acceptable for average editor of the project in targeted language. Said so, we'd need serious linguistic work for every language added to the system. At the other side, I support Erik's intention to make free software tool for machine translation. But note that it's just the second step (Wikidata was the first one) on the long way. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l