[Foundation-l] Google Translate now assists with human translations of Wikipedia articles

[Chad]

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 5:26 PM, Brian<Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:
> Honestly, I should have learned by now to ignore comments like this. Google
> is the leading world expert on machine translation and they think it's a
> good idea. I understand why they think it's a good idea, you don't. You're
> shooting straight from the gut.
>
> On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 3:13 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 23:42, Brian<Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:
>> > Google has built in support for using its machine translation technology
>> to
>> > help bootstrap human translations of Wikipedia articles.
>> >
>> > http://translate.google.com/toolkit/docupload
>> >
>> > The benefit to Google is clear - they need sentence-aligned text in
>> multiple
>> > languages in order to bootstrap their automated system.
>> >
>> > This is a great example of machines helping people help machines help
>> > people, etc... I'm sure this is now the most efficient way to produce
>> high
>> > quality translations of Wikipedia articles en masse.
>> >
>> > We should take the ToS to make sure the translated text can be CC-BY-SA
>> > licensed.
>>
>> Machine translation in its current status is so useless for anything
>> beyond ordering Opera Garnier tickets, that the copyright status of
>> its output is not quite relevant and i don't expect this to change in
>> the next fifty years.
>>
>> --
>> אמיר אלישע אהרוני
>>
>> heb: http://haharoni.wordpress.com | eng: http://aharoni.wordpress.com
>> cat: http://aprenent.wordpress.com | rus: http://amire80.livejournal.com
>>
>> "We're living in pieces,
>>  I want to live in peace." - T. Moore
>>
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For what it's worth, Google's language tools have drastically improved
over the years. They're getting really good, honestly.

That all being said, they're not perfect and a machine translation is still
no substitute for a human translator.

-Chad