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

[Mark Williamson]

Actually, Google added... Pirate and Montenegrin.

Mark


On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 4:43 AM, Marcus Buck<me at marcusbuck.org> wrote:
> 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
>
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