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

[John at Darkstar]

There are two trends in machine translations; rule based translations
and statistical translations. Both have pros and cons. Rule based
translations seems to be possible to integrate with Wiktionary in such a
way that it can support Wikipedia. Statistical translations seems to be
possible to integrate more directly with Wikipedia. Both methods can use
the history of the translated article to identify where the translation
engine fails; for a rule based translation engine that usually means
there are some missing transfer rules, for a statistical translation
engine that means the engine has failed to adapt to some type of sentence.

Google previously used Systrans engine, but now uses their own. Sort of,
there are some rumors about them using a open source statistical
translation engine.
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/10/google-translate-switches-to-googles.html

Microsoft also uses a statistical translation engine.
http://blogs.msdn.com/translation/archive/2008/08/22/statistical-machine-translation-guest-blog.aspx

One very promising free rule based translation engine is Apertium
http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Main_Page

A very well known free statistical engine is Moses
http://www.statmt.org/moses/