On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 2:57 AM, stevertigo stvrtg@gmail.com wrote:
Translation between wikis currently exists as a largely pulling paradigm: Someone on the target wiki finds an article in another language (English for example) and then pulls it to their language wiki.
These days Google and other translate tools are good enough to use as the starting basis for an translated article, and we can consider how we make use of them in an active way. What is largely a "pull" paradigm can also be a "push" paradigm - we can use translation tools to "push" articles to other wikis.
I don't know whether other wikipedias have similar policies, but on the Italian Wikipedia an article which is just a machine translation can be speedy deleted according to our policies. The reason is that machine translations are not good enough and the autotranslated text is too difficult to read, at least for Italian. It is true that as Italian is not as used as a foreign language as others, native speakers are not used to people writing in bad Italian (Bad English is far more common) so it is natural to set a higher threshold. I agree that machine translations are a good starting point, but that means that someone who knows the target language (it doesn't matter whether as native or not) must fix the translation correcting for the typical machine mistakes (such as translating person names, etc.)
If there are issues, they can be overcome. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of articles in English can be "pushed" over to other languages, and fill a need for those topics in those languages.
I see a big risk that this may be perceived as cultural colonialism, but that's something that already happens (some parts of the world write more on Wikipedia than others). But somehow pushing from the small wikis to the big ones is one of the best ways to get local topics globally known.
Cruccone