Bill Clark wrote:
NOTE: I am replying to an older article because it was the most recent thread I could find in my archives on the topic. I think Jimmy's comments accurately reflect those of most people's (justified) low opinion of raw (unaided) machine translation output.
On 8/9/04, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
First, it is important to understand that for the most part, the individual wikipedia languages are not mere translations.
Perhaps they should be, or more precisely, perhaps there should be a way to get the English article translated into Urdu, as well as an Urdu version of the article (with different, Urdu-centric content, as we have now). I'd be interested in knowing how the French article on Sartre differed from the English one (for example) but I don't read French.
What is notable is the the Sartre and other articles in French and English are independently written rather than one being the translation of the other. At first glance the Spanish version appears to be a translation from English, and It is conceivable that one or more of the 37 other current versions of the Sartre article are translations, but I'm not in a position to verify that because of my limited knowledge of these languages. The Urdu version has not yet been written.
Looking at the brief introductory paragraph, and the first biography paragraph we have in English
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (1905 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905-06-21 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_21 – 1980 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980-04-15 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_15) was a French http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France existentialist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism philosopher http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher, dramatist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playwright, novelist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelist and critic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_criticism.
Early life and thoughtSartre was born in Paris http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris to parents Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_officer of the French Navy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Navy, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer, cousin of Albert Schweitzer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Schweitzer. When he was 15 months old, his father died of a fever http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fever and Anne-Marie raised him with help from her father, Charles Schweitzer, who taught Sartre mathematics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics and introduced him to classical literature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classics at an early age.
In French we have
Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris 21 juin http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_juin 1905 http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905 - Paris 15 avril http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_avril 1980 http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980) est un philosophe http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophe et écrivain français http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89crivains_Fran%C3%A7ais_Par_Ordre_Alphab%C3%A9tique.
[ Biographie
Né à Paris http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris le 21 juin http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_juin 1905 http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905, Sartre est orphelin de père à deux ans et grandit à Paris http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris, dans un milieu bourgeois et intellectuel. Il fait ses études secondaires au lycée Henri IV http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyc%C3%A9e_Henri_IV, où il fait la connaissance de Paul Nizan http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Nizan.
which translates as
Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris, June 21, 1905 - Paris, April 15, 1980) is a French philosopher and writer
Biography
Born in Paris on June 21, 1905, Sartre was paternally orphaned at two years old and grew up in Paris, in a bourgeois and intellectual environment. His secondary studies were done at the Lycée Henri IV, where he became acquainted with Paul Nizan
It is interesting to note that reference to the Schweitzer family appears nowhere in the French article, and Paul Nizan appears nowhere in the English article!
Second, machine language translation is typically quite poor.
There are ways to get much, much better machine translation with a little extra effort from native speakers of the source language. If the words in an article are part-of-speech (POS) tagged (noun, verb, adjective, preposition, etc.) then the quality of machine translation of that text improves dramatically.
I agree that there are ways to improve machine translations, but it strikes me as impossible for machines to reconcile the cultural gaps which may exist between language versions. That requires the intervention of thinking humans.
Ec