prasad gadgil wrote:
That has made me think of alternatives - machine translation. [..] Pl. comment about this approach. Has this been tried for any other language earlier.
I'm not clear on what you're asking about. Machine translation has certainly been available for a variety of languages for quite some time, e.g. http://www.google.com/language_tools or AltaVista Babelfish (I believe they use the same SysTran backend). The technology keeps improving, but even after working with state of the art, backpropagating neural network-based translators, I remain unimpressed - don't have your hopes up too high.
If you're proposing adding a new Wikipedia language purely on the basis of translated articles, I do not believe that's been done, and it probably wouldn't be a good idea. Getting people that speak your language involved, and then having them individually use machine translation on articles they want to work on, fix those up, and put them into Wikipedia seems like a much better option.
Cheers, Ivan.