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

[Marcus Buck]

Gerard Meijssen hett schreven:
> Hoi,
> The quality of the translations will vary. There are many reasons for it and
> one of the things that will make a difference is the number of people using
> the translate tool as a rough first pass. Once this is done, using the
> translation functionality will help Google to improve the quality of the
> code.
>
> This has been said before, there is no news here. What is relevant however
> is that in order to support the languages that have not been supported so
> far, there is a need for people actually using this tool to build the
> translation corpus that gets you this first pass functionality.
>
> Translation is not something where a silver bullet will provide an "instant
> on - high quality" experience and it is the languages that are currently not
> supported that have the highest need for tools like this.
This is interesting. I did not know it's possible to train new 
languages. Is there any available information on the requirements? What 
requirements need to be met, to make Google support them (so they can be 
selected in the drop-down at the translator toolkit)? _How much_ text do 
they need as a basis to finally enable the translation function?

(My personal experience with the collaboratetiveness of Google is a bad 
one. Although Google is a multi-billion dollar company and [in a fair 
world] should actually _pay_ people for things like translating their 
interface in as much languages as possible [as Google with its 80% 
search engine market share is one of the most important internet access 
vectors and not having a search engine in your language is a big 
accessibility barrier] they rather choose to go the cheap way and let 
volunteers translate it. That not enough, they have the chutzpa to 
_reject_ adding any further languages [no additions since at least 2007, 
although they still support Elmer Fudd, bork bork bork, Klingon and 
pirate speak...]. At the moment Google supports the languages of 
roundabout 85 to 90% of the world's population and it seems, they don't 
care about the rest.)

Marcus Buck