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

[David Goodman]

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 6:01 PM, Amir E. Aharoni<amir.aharoni at gmail.com> wrote:

> An unedited machine-translated text is likely to be speedily deleted
> as patent nonsense, before copyvio is even considered.
>
> --
> אמיר אלישע אהרוני
> Amir Elisha Aharoni
>
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com

If it is deleted as nonsense,  that will be a gross error by the
administrator, at least in enWP.  It is usually possible to roughly
understand what is meant in a Google translation. That's enough to
defeat speedy deletion. What these texts need is revision. I think of
them essentially as an automated dictionary.

If I have any understanding of the subject at all, my quite elementary
knowledge of French or German lets me compare the translation with the
original, and then rewrite the article into acceptable English much
more rapidly than if I had only the original text and a conventional
dictionary--essentially as I would do of texts translated into English
by someone with a good knowledge of the original language but a very
minimal knowledge of the target language, English and no grasp of
English idiom.

What I usually find in such translations is that only part of the
article is translated--sometimes only the lede paragraph, but rarely
including the references or figure legends or the like--which often
causes these articles to be nominated for deletion as non notable and
unsourced, by people too lazy to follow the interlanguage link.
.Almost never is there any search for the correct internal wikilinks

Even in languages I cannot actually read, such as the other Romance
languages , or Russian, I can generally at least add the references
section and fix some of the internal links, and thus preserve the
article  for someone who can do better.


David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

>