Actually this _is_ about turning ContentTranslation off, that is what several users in the community want. They block people using the extension and delete the translated articles. Use of ContentTranslation has become a rather contentious case.
Yandex as a general translation engine to be able to read some alien language is quite good, but as an engine to produce written text it is not very good at all. In fact it often creates quite horrible Norwegian, even for closely related languages. One quite common problem is reordering of words into meaningless constructs, an other problem is reordering lexical gender in weird ways. The English preposition "a" is often translated as "en" in a propositional phrase, and then the gender is added to the following phrase. That gives a translation of "Oppland is a county in…" into something like "Oppland er en fylket i…" This should be "Oppland er et fylke i…". (I just checked and it seems like Yandex messes up a lot less now than previously, but it is still pretty bad.) Apertium works because the language is closely related, Yandex does not work because it is used between very different languages. People try to use Yandex and gets disappointed, and falsely conclude that all language translations are equally weird. They are not, but Yandex translations are weird. The numerical threshold does not work. The reason is simple, the number of fixes depends on language constructs that fails, and that is simply not a constant for small text fragments. Perhaps if we could flag specific language constructs that is known to give a high percentage of failures, and if the translator must check those sentences. One such language construct is disappearances between the preposition and the gender of the following term in a prepositional phrase. If they are not similar, then the sentence must be checked. It is not always wrong to write "en jenta" in Norwegian, but it is likely to be wrong. A language model could be a statistical model for the language itself, not for the translation into that language. We don't want a perfect language model, but a sufficient language model to mark weird constructs. A very simple solution could simply be to mark tri-grams that does not already exist in the text base for the destination as possible errors. It is not necessary to do a live check, but at least do it before the page can be saved. Note the difference in what Yandex do and what we want to achieve; Yandex translates a text between two different languages, without any clear reason why. It is not to important if there are weird constructs in the text, as long as it is usable in "some" context. We translate a text for the purpose of republishing it. The text should be usable and easily readable in that language. On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 7:07 PM, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote: > 2017-05-02 18:20 GMT+03:00 John Erling Blad <jeb...@gmail.com>: > > > Brute force solution; turn the ContentTranslation off. Really stupid > > solution. > > > ... Then I guess you don't mind that I'm changing the thread name :) > > > > The next solution; turn the Yandex engine off. That would solve a > > part of the problem. Kind of lousy solution though. > > > > > What about adding a language model that warns when the language > constructs > > gets to weird? It is like a "test" for the translation. The CT is used > for > > creating a translation, but the language model is used for verifying if > the > > translation is good enough. If it does not validate against the language > > model it should simply not be published to the main name space. It will > > still be possible to create a draft, but then the user is completely > aware > > that the translation isn't good enough. > > > > Such a language model should be available as a test for any article, as > it > > can be used as a quality measure for the article. It is really a quantity > > measure for the well-spokenness of the article, but that isn't quite so > > intuitive. > > > > So, I'll allow myself to guess that you are talking about one particular > language, probably Norwegian. > > Several technical facts: > > 1. In the past there were several cases in which translators to different > languages who reported common translation mistakes to me. I passed them on > to Yandex developers, with whom I communicate quite regularly. They > acknowledged receiving all of them. I am aware of at least one such common > mistake that was fixed; possibly there were more. If you can give me a list > of such mistakes for Norwegian, I'll be very happy to pass them on. I > absolutely cannot promise that they will be fixed upstream, but it's > possible. > > 2. In Norwegian, Apertium is used for translating between the two varieties > of Norwegian itself (Bokmål and Nynorsk), and from other Scandinavian > languages. That's probably why it works so well—they are similar in > grammar, vocabulary, and narrative style (I'll pass it on to Apertium > developers—I'm sure they'll be happy to hear it). Unfortunately, machine > translation from English is not available in Apertium. Apertium works best > with very similar languages, and English has two characteristics, which are > unfortunate when combined: it is both the most popular source for > translation into almost all other languages (including Norwegian), and it > is not _very_ similar to any other languages (except maybe Scots). Machine > translation from English into Norwegian is only possible with Yandex at the > moment. More engines may be added in the future, but at the moment that's > all we have. That's why disabling Yandex completely would indeed be a lousy > solution: A lot of people say that without machine translation integration > Content Translation is useless. Not all users think like that, but many do. > > 3. We can define a numerical threshold of acceptable percentage of machine > translation post-editing. Currently it's 75%. It's a tad embarrassing, but > it's hard-coded at the moment, but it can be very easily be made into a > variable per language. If the translator tries to publish a page in which > less than that is modified, a warning will be shown. > > 4. I'm not sure what do you mean by "language model". If it's any kind of a > linguistic engine, then it's definitely not within the resources that the > Language team itself can currently dedicate. However, if somebody who knows > Norwegian and some programming will write a script that analyzes common bad > constructs in a Wikipedia dump, this will be very useful. This would > basically be an upgraded version of suggestion #1 above. (In my spare time > as a volunteer I'm doing something comparable for Hebrew, although not for > translation, but for improving how MediaWiki link trails work.) > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ > wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ > wiki/Wikimedia-l > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
