Aphaia, Shiju Alex and I are referring to Google Translator Toolkit, not Google Translate. If the person using the Toolkit uses it as it was _meant_ to be used, the results should be as good as a human translation because they've been reviewed and corrected by a human.
-m.
On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 12:42 PM, Aphaia aphaia@gmail.com wrote:
GT fails. At least for Japanese, it sucks. And that is why I don't support it. GT may fit to SVO languages, but for SOV languages, it is nothing but a crap.
Imagine to fix a 4000 words of documents whose all lines are sort of "all your base is belong to us". It's not a simple thing as you imagine - "spelling and punctuation". I admit it has been improved (now Free Tibet from English to Japanese is "Furi Tibetto", not former "muryo tibetto" (Tibet for gratis) in two years ago - but craps are still craps and I don't want to spend my hours for the for-profit giant.
On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 6:42 PM, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 1:36 AM, Shiju Alex shijualexonline@gmail.com wrote:
1. Ban the project of Google as done by the Bengali wiki community (Bad solution, and I am personally against this solution) 2. Ask Google to engage wiki community (As happened in the case of Tamil) to find out a working solution. But if there is no active wiki community what Google can do. But does this mean that Google can continue with the project as they want? (Very difficult solution if there is no active wiki community) 3. Find some other solution. For example, Is it possible to upload the translated articles in a separate name space, for example, Google: Let the community decides what needs to be taken to the main/article namespace. 4. .........
If some solution is not found soon, Google's effort is going to create problem in many language wikipedias. The worst result of this effort would be the rift between the wiki community and the Google translators (speakers of the same language) :(
Shiju
Shiju,
I think you have made some great suggestions here. I'd like to add a couple of my own:
- Fix some of the formatting errors with GTTK. Would this really be
so difficult? It seems to me that the breaking of links is a bug that needs fixing by Google. 2) Implement spelling and punctuation check automatically within GTTK before posting of the articles. 3) Have GTTK automatically remove broken templates and images, or require users to translate any templates before a page may be posted. 4) Include a list of most needed articles for people to create, rather than random articles that will be of little use to local readers. Some articles, such as those on local topics, have the added benefit of encouraging more edits and community participation since they tend to generate more interest from speakers of a language in my experience.
3 of these are things for Google to work on, one is something for us to work on. I think this is a potentially valuable resource, the problem is channeling the efforts and energies of these well-meaning people in the right direction so that local Wikipedias don't end up full of low-quality, unreadable articles with little hope for improvement. I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
-m.
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-- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD
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