Tomer Chachamu wrote:
On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 18:32:59 +0200, Andy Rabagliati andyr@wizzy.com wrote:
If we plug away at the en: wikipedia, adding African-related articles, maybe a couple of years down the line we will be able to automatically translate to Xhosa. I think that is a /much/ better use of everyone's time than writing a Xhosa wikipedia.
I think not. As your KDE example showed, translation is far more complicated than simple dictionary lookups. Xhosa is only spoken by 7.9m speakers (mainly in South Africa) and with so few speakers (and so little commercial possibility for making a translator) I would imagine that Xhosa may never be able to be translated.
Actually, I just read that it is similar to Zulu, which probably adds some more "speakers". Still, I think development of a machine translation program is unlikely.
It may still be possible to do human translation though. As hard as translation is, I think translating 1000 articles from [x] to Xhosa may be easier, in terms of time and especially required research resources, than writing 1000 new articles in Xhosa. Since all the articles in all the languages are GFDL, this is a good way to bootstrap new Wikipedias if there's an interested translator. This has been going on on el: (Greek) for example.
It might also answer the question of how to get more diversity into languages with non-diverse speaker populations. Even if there's no Chinese (for example) who speak a particular language, it can still get the Chinese point of view if someone speaks Chinese and can translate information from zh:, or from some other Wikipedia (like en:) that Chinese editors.
Even the larger Wikipedias could benefit from some of this. I've translated several German Wikipedia articles to English, despite my terrible knowledge of German, simply because they had a lot more information on certain subjects (e.g. [[Gregor Gysi]]).
The ultimate vision, IMO, would be to have all Wikipedias have essentially the same content, just translated, rather than each one taking its own biased-towards-its-speakers viewpoint and focus.
-Mark