prasad gadgil wrote: 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. 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

On Monday 09 August 2004 16:05, prasad gadgil wrote: There is entire English Wikipedia translated to Czech at http://wikipedia.infostar.cz/ . But the quality of the translation is not too good, I am told.

NOTE: I am replying to an older article because it was the most recent thread I could find in my archives on the topic. I think Jimmy's comments accurately reflect those of most people's (justified) low opinion of raw (unaided) machine translation output. On 8/9/04, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote: Perhaps they should be, or more precisely, perhaps there should be a way to get the English article translated into Urdu, as well as an Urdu version of the article (with different, Urdu-centric content, as we have now). I'd be interested in knowing how the French article on Sartre differed from the English one (for example) but I don't read French. There are ways to get much, much better machine translation with a little extra effort from native speakers of the source language. If the words in an article are part-of-speech (POS) tagged (noun, verb, adjective, preposition, etc.) then the quality of machine translation of that text improves dramatically. I work for the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania, where I provide IT support to a group of linguists who create and distribute the corpora (datasets) used by the researchers (both public and private) who develop machine translation systems, automatic content-extraction systems, and a variety of other computational linguistic systems. If people are interested, I'll look into getting a few articles POS-tagged (bribe a linguistics grad student with free lunch or something) and run them through some public (grant-funded, opensource) MT systems to demo the output. If the output is reasonable enough to offer up on the site as-is, or with minimal corrections (maybe a few sentences) then I'd think it might be worth considering. As a huge (and rapidly growing) collection of GFDL-ed text, the Wikipedia is a valuable public linguistic resource. If it could also provide a set of parallel text in several different languages (the human-corrected versions of machine translated articles) then it would become even more valuable, a virtual Rosetta Stone for the modern age. -Bill Clark

On 11/20/05, Bill Clark <wclarkxoom(a)gmail.com> wrote: [snip] [snip] I've been making a little effort on and off again to improve the parsability of Wikipedia articles by Link Grammar (http://bobo.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/). Generally the formal style used on most articles provides easy material for link grammar to correctly parse and most of the statements that unparsable are clear grammatical or spelling mistakes. Generally the two biggest sources of parse errors which can not be attributed to an obvious mistake that I've run into using link grammar is the omission of the serial comma, and subject area verbs which are not in my dictionary. I'm not sure why the serial comma isn't required in the manual of style as it's omission sometimes causes human readers to incorrectly group objects. I think that machine readability for Wikipedia should be a long term goal, even if we do not intend to use it to facilitate translation. Generally text which is machine parsable without markup also tends to be more easily readable by human readers who have widely varying levels of skill. Once we factor in the improvements in searching, translation, and machine intelligence, the desirability of machine parsibility becomes more clear. For example, I've toyed with making my content filtering bot (output available on freenode irc in #wikipedia-suspectedits) use link grammar to parse sentences and detect when someone has negated/inverted the meaning of a sentence. Unfortunately I can't put this into production on my bot because the machine parsability of Wikipedia is currently too low, and link-grammar's performance on difficult to parse text is currently too low.