[Foundation-l] Push translation

[Cool Hand Luke]

Mass machine translations ("pushing" them onto other projects that may or
may not want them) is a very bad idea.

Beginning in 2004-05, a non-native speaker on en.wp decided that he should
import slightly-cleaned babelfish translations of foreign language articles
that did not have articles on the English wikipedia.  They were almost
uniformly horrid, and required many volunteer hours to clean up (I believe
some were simply deleted). The user had to be restrained from importing
additional articles in this manner.

I would not want to impose cleanup jobs upon users who did not volunteer for
them.  In other words, I think the "pull" method of translation is not a
bug--it's a feature--it ensures that a competent native speaker is willing
and able to satisfactorily port an article to a different language.

That said, if someone wants to develop a tool to aid "pullers" by making a
first-pass translation of the wikitext of an article, I think that would be
an unambiguously good thing.

Frank