[Wikimediaindia-l] Re: Philosophical view on Google translated articles

Hello, My first post on this list, and a long one :-) The topic of better supporting small language Wikipedias is one that is close to my heart. The foundation doesn't have any particular policy on third-party translations or article-writing projects. As Achal says, every community is welcome to use translation tools or not as they see fit; and to work with outside translation groups or not as they see fit. Ravi's concerns are valid -- people interested in translation as a whole may want to discuss some of these issues on the foundation and translation mailing lists -- you will find that there are many multilingual editors who are interested in the good (and bad) uses of GTT and other translation tools. == on the use of automatic translations == Automatic translations can be useful as one arrow in the quiver of a community of editors. For instance, I find it helpful for translated pages to have an automatic category, and a large cleanup template at top, something like: "this page was automatically translated by [TOOL] from [permalink to revision of article in another language]. It may need cleanup to meet [[STYLE GUIDE|community standards]]." In the case of Google and their Translation Toolkit, I think it would be good for Wikipedians to give them strong feedback about how they need to improve the tool for it to be more useful to Wikipedians. (and, if it is more of a nuisance than a help, the community should be clear that it is not helping.) == On Google's toolkit and translation work == Google has been fairly transparent about what they are doing, and has been in touch with the Foundation on a few occasions to ask for advice on how to make their tools more useful. I encourage them to ask the local communities directly for that advice... (however, they have had few direct responses from those language-communities. I observed this directly on swahili wikipedia - there were a few general commnts about the difficulties raised by GTT overwriting existing articles, but few specific feature requests / recommendations / requirements from the active swahili editors.) You can start a page for feature requests (and feature requirements) for this sort of translation -- and tell the Google translators (in particular) that all translations /must/ adhere to a certain style or format, or must be less invasive when an article already exists on the topic. (noone will continue a project if they know that its work is going to be reverted or removed.) I don't think they have any interest in gaining monopoly over Wikipedia. They are not storing the translated articles, only publishing them to Wikipedia. While they are storing the "translation memory" produced as a result, they make that available under a free license, for other translators or tools to use. Google has carried out similar projects in Arabic and Swahili among other languges; I helped with the recent Swahili Wikipedia Challenge, which was supported by GTT (for participants who wanted to use the toolkit to translate an article rather than writing one from scratch) -- but the resulting articles were rated based on their usefulness, so that poorly-translated articles did not rank highly. That was a largely community-driven translation effort, with a contest run and maintained by Swahili admins. http://sw.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:KWC Cheers, SJ -- Samuel Klein http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/user:sj