2010/7/25 Shiju Alex shijualexonline@gmail.com:
Hello All,
Recently there are lot of discussions (in this list also) regarding the translation project by Google for some of the big language wikipedias. The foundation also seems like approved the efforts of Google. But I am not sure whether any one is interested to consult the respective language community to know their views.
At the same session at Wikimania a very sensible approach was presented by Mikel Iturbe from the Basque Wikipedia:
* They didn't use Google Translate, but an academically-developed tool, which also happened to be Free Software - which diminished the arguments about commercialization.
* The editors community was involved throughout the whole process.
* Articles were not uploaded without correcting mistakes that the translation software made.
* What's also important, the corrections were reported to the translation software developers, so they would try to improve it.
Of course, not every language community can afford developing Free-as-in-speech academic translation software, but the other points are useful to everybody.
Mikel Iturbe's presentation: * http://www.slideshare.net/janfri/wikimania2010
The academic papers related to that project: * http://ixa.si.ehu.es/openmt2/argitalpenak_html * http://ixa.si.ehu.es/Ixa/Argitalpenak/Artikuluak/index_html?Atala=Artikulua_...