tarquin wrote:
I'll believe it when I see it. HUMANS have difficulty translating. It's a very imprecise art. A computer would need to understand meaning to effectively translate anything beyond very basic sentences. I HOPE Wikipedia articles are written with a little more style than that!
Systrans, which you recommended, gives this in French:
Les HUMAINS ont la traduction de difficulté. C'est un art très imprécis. Un ordinateur devrait comprendre la signification pour traduire efficacement n'importe quoi au delà des phrases très de base. J'espère que des articles de Wikipedia sont écrits avec peu plus de modèle que cela !
Now that is junk. A french wikipedian wanting to clean this up might not have a clue for some of the incorrect words.
They would need to refer back to the english version to see what was meant in the first place -- in other words, they would have to be bilingual. And a bilingual user might as well write from scratch.
If you want concrete examples -- they would have no way of knowing "style" was meant by "modele" without translating back into English and doing some guesswork. They would probably think it mean "I hope that wikipedia articles are written with a better template".