prasad gadgil wrote:
I have just joined, I am from mumbai, india. I would like to get the articles translated in marathi, my mother tongue. Looking at the effort and no of volunteers, this will not be usable in any reasonable amount of time.
I understand. According to Wikipedia, there are 68 million native speakers of Marathi, and 3 million second language speakers. This is comparable, for example, to Italian, with 70 million total speakers.
Getting Wikipedia content in languages such as Marathi is absolutely central to our mission, and so I want you to know that I support you fully in your desire to find ways to make this happen in a timely and effective manner.
That has made me think of alternatives - machine translation. A state funded institute has a software available but I don't have access to it yet.
Pl. comment about this approach. Has this been tried for any other language earlier.
First, it is important to understand that for the most part, the individual wikipedia languages are not mere translations. In some cases, of course, contributors find it easier to just translate an article -- after all, for many many topics, en.wikipedia.org is the most convenient and best reference, and the content is available for free. But it is more generally the case in fr, de, ja, it, etc. that the articles are independent constructions from scratch.
Second, machine language translation is typically quite poor. It is not likely that the tool you are talking about can do a good enough job.
At the same time, I absolutely think that if you can find a way to get access (is there some way that I can help, for example by writing a letter to some authorities, or giving you a signature on an application, or even paying money, if it is not too much?) for wikipedia contributors to this state-funded agency's tool, then if it helps a small number of contributors to work faster, then I am all for it.
What I would envision is that you would have to do a machine translation and then immediately edit it to correct grammar and meaning mistakes. Whether that would be faster or slower than either writing the article from scratch or doing a human-translation yourself, I do not know.
--Jimbo