[Foundation-l] Is Google translation is good for Wikipedias?

[David Gerard]

On 1 August 2010 03:30, Jimmy O'Regan <joregan at gmail.com> wrote:

> Depending on the languages involved, the amount of resources available
> for those languages, and having realistic expectations, a usable system
> can be made in as little as 3-6 months by a single motivated volunteer,
> with help from experienced developers. Earlier this year, at the request
> of Crisis Commons, 3 of us built a Haitian Creole to English prototype in
> less than a week.
> Staying motivated is *hard*. We have 2-3 times as many half-working
> prototypes as we have released language pairs. Having realistic
> expectations is hard. People want English, and/or they want to include
> *everything* (budget at least a year of full time work for anything to
> English).
> If you know the difference between noun, adjective, and verb, understand
> Zipf's law, and want open source MT for a pair of languages, come find us
> on #apertium on FreeNode. We'll be happy to help.


Hmm. This sounds to me like something it would be on-mission for WMF
to fund a developer for.

Of course, there's lots of other quick wins we could achieve with paid
developer time. But this strikes me as something to keep in mind.


- d.