On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 8:07 PM, Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.comwrote:
I would consider this state as a poor reflection on Commons'
accessibility.
Especially as Google image search (imho, the likeliest avenue of
searching
for images) gives 130 000 pictures of horses on Commons if searched in English, zero if searched in Estonian ("hobu"), and while it gives 160
000
results for a Hungarian search ("ló") on the first page only one of it is
an
image that resembles a horse.
Here's a thought: Enter "hobu" into translate.google.com, leave "source language" on automatic and target on "English", and it will happily translate it into "horse". Could we offer a "translation" link in search? As in, "translate my query into English and try again"? I'm sure we can come to an arrangement with Google (or someone else).
Sorry if I misunderstand your suggestion.
I'm sure power users can find any number of ways to do this (I think Google already offers a similar service somewhere hidden away) though they probably speak English as well, to reach those who do not speak English or aren't power users it has to be super obvious, I'm afraid. Google will probably reach that point sometime, but while they usually support a couple of dozen languages, we do so with a couple of hundred.
I would be happy to see though some translation magic applied to Commons' category system the way templates now autotranslate - given the fact that we have a huge translation community and that interwiki links and links from Wikipedia's to Commons can be used to guess the meanings (which than could be confirmed by a human in some addictive "game"). I am not sure if Google would take the hint of the localized category names in their image search but it would be a start.
(Having an easy, special interface -- that cuts away all the wikicode confusion leaving just the image and the existing translations and a next button, adds some AJAXy background magic,maybe suggestions through the Google Translate API - to translate image descriptions might also help drive the localisation of the image descriptions. Probably there are some userscripts that do this but they could be turned on by default or at least made more prominent.)
Best regards, Bence