On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 7:26 AM, Denny Vrandečić <
denny.vrandecic(a)wikimedia.de> wrote:
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.
You are blowing my mind, dude. :)
I suspect this approach won't serve for everything, but it sounds
*awesome*. If we can tie natural-language statements directly to data nodes
(rather than merely annotating vague references like we do today), then
we'd be much better able to keep language versions in sync. How to make
them sane to edit... sounds harder. :)
It would be foolish to create any such plan without reusing tools and
concepts from the Translate extension, translation
memories, etc. There is
a lot of UI and conceptual goodness in these tools. The idea would be to
make them user extensible with rules.
Heck yeah!
If you want, examples of that are the bots working on some Wikipedias
currently, creating text from structured input. They
are partially reusing
the same structured input, and need "merely" a translation in the way the
bots create the text to save in the given Wikipedia. I have seen some
research in the area, but they all have one or the other drawbacks, but can
and should be used as an inspiration and to inform the project (like
Allegro Controlled English, or a Chat program developed at the Open
University in Milton Keynes to allow conducting business in different
languages, etc.)
Yessss... make them real-time updatable instead of one-time bots producing
language which can't be maintained.
-- brion