On Sun, Jul 13, 2003 at 10:28:04PM +0200, Youandme wrote:
On 13 Jul 2003 at 21:10, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
Just wondering - how much would it cost to hire translators that would translate all contents of English Wikipedia to some 20 or so languages ? Common sense suggests that translating is much easier than developing anew, yet we keep doing it the hard way.
I'm not saying that translated English Wikipedia should replace other 'pedias, but these translations could be used as sources for them.
Any estimates in manhours or cash ?
Algorithm:
- count all chars in the en-wp
- divide this number by 1500*
- multiply by the price offered by the translator or translation service**
- 1500 chars per page is the volume of one standard page of a sworn translation
** The price for translation en->pl offered by one of Polish Internet translation services is 31 zlotys per page (= 7.9 USD). We can try to optimize this
The size of wp-en sql dump is 421407730 bytes (July 8, 2003) if the ratio of rough text to sql dump & wikicode of wikipage is (let's say) 0.90, then the price for the translation en->pl would be ~253000 zlotys (~= 64400 USD)
I can't repeat these numbers, not any computation error ?
Some googling (tl/umaczenie angielski, first hit) showed 1800 chars (including punctuation) per page, 30 zloty per page,
select sum(length(cur_text)) from cur; 378 523 585
pages (1800 chars = 1 page) 210 290.88
cost (30 zloty / page) 6 308 726.4 zloty
cost (4 EUR / zloty, hehe) 1 577 181.6 EUR
Of course it relies on absurd assumption that 1 byte = 1 character, and it's really 210 thousand pages.
Any idea what's character:byte ratio like ? Rendering 1000 random articles into HTML, and counting chars would probably work.