On 1 August 2010 03:30, Jimmy O'Regan joregan@gmail.com wrote:
Depending on the languages involved, the amount of resources available for those languages, and having realistic expectations, a usable system can be made in as little as 3-6 months by a single motivated volunteer, with help from experienced developers. Earlier this year, at the request of Crisis Commons, 3 of us built a Haitian Creole to English prototype in less than a week. Staying motivated is *hard*. We have 2-3 times as many half-working prototypes as we have released language pairs. Having realistic expectations is hard. People want English, and/or they want to include *everything* (budget at least a year of full time work for anything to English). If you know the difference between noun, adjective, and verb, understand Zipf's law, and want open source MT for a pair of languages, come find us on #apertium on FreeNode. We'll be happy to help.
Hmm. This sounds to me like something it would be on-mission for WMF to fund a developer for.
Of course, there's lots of other quick wins we could achieve with paid developer time. But this strikes me as something to keep in mind.
- d.