[Wikimedia-l] The case for supporting open source machine translation

[Mathieu Stumpf]

Le 2013-04-25 16:26, Denny Vrandečić a écrit :
> Erik,
>
> 2013/4/25 Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org>
>
>> > The system I am really aiming at is a different one, and there has
>> > been plenty of related work in this direction: imagine a wiki 
>> where you
>> > enter or edit content, sentence by sentence, but the natural 
>> language
>> > representation is just a surface syntax for an internal structure. 
>> Your
>> > editing interface is a constrained, but natural language. Now, in 
>> order
>> to
>> > really make this fly, both the rules for the parsers (interpreting 
>> the
>> > input) and the serializer (creating the output) would need to be 
>> editable
>> > by the community - in addition to the content itself. There are a 
>> number
>> of
>> > major challenges involved, but I have by now a fair idea of how to 
>> tackle
>> > most of them (and I don't have the time to detail them right now).
>>
>> So what would you want to enable with this? Faster bootstrapping of
>> content? How would it work, and how would this be superior to an
>> approach like the one taken in the Translate extension (basically,
>> providing good interfaces for 1:1 translation, tracking differences
>> between documents, and offering MT and translation memory based
>> suggestions)? Are there examples of this approach being taken
>> somewhere else?
>
>
>
> 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 would be the limits you would expect from your solution, because 
you can't expect to just "translate" everything. Form may be a part of 
the meaning. It's clear that you can't translate a poem for example. Sur 
wikipedia is not primary concerned about poetry, but it does treat the 
subject.


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