"Daniel Mayer" <maveric149(a)yahoo.com> schrieb:
By the way,
was not there an old project aiming at
translation at least 2 years ago ?
Yep
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Machine_Translation_Project
Although the wiki is not available right now...
Machine translation has come a long way since that idea was first put forward
for Wikipedia. We may want to look at the idea again. A special:translate
function might be a nice tool to have - that way humans would control the
process on an article by article basis (correcting any errors that result).
If done correctly, the result should be no worse than copyedited and
error-checked EB 1911-derived articles (many of which are pretty good).
You seem to have a more positive view of machine translation than I have.
Machine translations can be helpful in translating, but no good translation
will be got by taking a machine translation and 'correcting the errors'.
Rather, one will have to write at least half and probably everything by
hand, and have the machine translation only as a reference.
Just change the following into correct English (from es:Etimología del topónimo Perú)
It is known that, at least from 1523, ten years before the Spanish conquest, the Peru name
already is fixed, as they testify referring documents to the payment of tributes by gold
obtained in the Paschal expedition of of Andagoya "que went to the province of Peru,
and Juan Garci'a de Montenegro, who was by Veedor (...) certain gold which they said
had been it the this trip of the Perú". Before paying attention the form definitive
of the name it had had variant like Birú, Berú or Pirú, with which one is in diverse
documents of the time.
Andre Engels