Dear Wiki*edians & especially polyglots :
In the spirit of Thanksgiving, being thankful as ever for these
polylingual projects (I just won a bet with a Chilean about his home
town, referencing spanish wp articles :), I would like to propose a
new one (gasp!) : an all-language wiki devoted to language overviews,
language proposals, interface localization (text, images, &c), and
translations of core Wikimedia and MediaWiki messages. Similar
proposals have been floated before, with little discussion; here is
another attempt on the theme.
* Name : babel.wikimedia.org ?
* Main Page : a list of languages by, say, # of native
speakers/readers [1], with prominent links to other views (by
language-cluster, by geographic region, by article-count, by reader
popularity...), information on translators & translation, and language
statistics [2].
* Content : All localizable MediaWiki strings, in 200+ languages [3].
Portals for each language, describing work being done to develop that
language, with portal-content in a few core language + the lang in
question. All localizable custom strings for Wikimedia projects, in
those languages. Key strings and messages (such as site-wide notice
templates) which are used regularly and needed in every language.
Policy and discussion pages about new language creation.
** Optional content : Other translation efforts, such as global press
releases, which work through a high volume of content (thousands of
edits in dozens of languages) in a short period of time.
** Related project : a specific "interface-translation wiki" for the
latest MediaWiki installation, which auto-updates the localizable
strings in the latest MW version.[4]
Please comment or indicate support for the idea on meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#Babel_Wiki
[1] Not just readers; if there's no written language, audio output and
input are excellent ways to transfer information... we've been doing
that for eons longer than we've been passing around printed bytes
[2] % completion of interface translation; # of self-identified
'translators' in and out of the lang; full list of wikimedia projects
in that lang w/origin-dates, article and active-editor counts; links
to key pages on target wikis
[3] Eventually significantly more than 200.
[3'] It may be useful to have one template/page per string per
language, to facilitate automatic conversion from wiki to other
formats; multiple views of l10n strings (e.g., 2 langs side-by-side on
one page as in Special:Allmessages). ~200 languages x (200 custom
strings x 5 Wikimedia Projects + 1000 standard strings) = O(500K)
pages, worth its own project.
[4] These ideas could be merged; or that project (say, at
language.mediawiki.org) could offer ways to pull content from the
appropriate section of the Babel wiki (and more security safeguards).
++SJ
No necessary,we needed to translate the complete English wikipedia to
Spanish or another language but to translate some articles or
wikibooks to one language to another always with the supervision of a
person with knowledge of the two language and the mater of the article
or wikibook. In this way increase the amount of articles of another
language also to translate articles from other language to English.
--
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** Angel Rodriguez **
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I went to www.wikipedia.org and I found that in English they had
831000 articles but in other language like Spanish they only had 75
000. I understand that is difficult to find people that in the spare
of their time do all the translation for one language to other. The
other day I tray other way,it was to use translate, a web page tools
from google( http://www.google.com/language_tools) from English to
Spanish. I found this tool very useful because no more in from of me
I had 75 000 articles in Spanish, in reality I had 831 000 articles in
Spanish. I want to know if there is a way to use this tools to make a
more permanent translation of the majority of articles in English to
another language , I understand with some kind of supervision in that
way to ratify any errors in the process , and in the same time with
the authorization of google without loosing any of principle of the
free encyclopedia wikipedia.org.
I don't work for google or wikipedia.org, I only a customer
for the service of both.
sincerely
--
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** Angel Rodriguez **
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