Having tried it tonight, I don't find the Google translator toolkit all that useful,
at least not at this present level of development. To sum up:
First you read their translation.
Then you scratch your head: What the deuce is that supposed to mean ...?
Then you check the original language version.
Then you compare the two.
Then you start wondering: How did *this* turn into *that*?
Then you shake your head.
(Note: everything up to this point is unproductive time.)
Then you look at the original again and try to translate it.
As you do, you invariably end up leaving the Google shite where it is and writing your own
text.
In the end, you delete the Google shite, and then, as you do so, you kick yourself because
there were two words in there that you needn't have typed yourself.
Epic fail.
A.
--- On Wed, 28/7/10, Cool Hand Luke <User.CoolHandLuke(a)gmail.com> wrote:
From: Cool Hand Luke
<User.CoolHandLuke(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Push translation
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Wednesday, 28 July, 2010, 0:27
Mass machine translations ("pushing"
them onto other projects that may or
may not want them) is a very bad idea.
Beginning in 2004-05, a non-native speaker on en.wp decided
that he should
import slightly-cleaned babelfish translations of foreign
language articles
that did not have articles on the English wikipedia.
They were almost
uniformly horrid, and required many volunteer hours to
clean up (I believe
some were simply deleted). The user had to be restrained
from importing
additional articles in this manner.
I would not want to impose cleanup jobs upon users who did
not volunteer for
them. In other words, I think the "pull" method of
translation is not a
bug--it's a feature--it ensures that a competent native
speaker is willing
and able to satisfactorily port an article to a different
language.
That said, if someone wants to develop a tool to aid
"pullers" by making a
first-pass translation of the wikitext of an article, I
think that would be
an unambiguously good thing.
Frank
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