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.