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

[Mark Williamson]

Ziko, again, we are not talking about machine translations; Google
doesn't have machine translation for Bangla, Malayalam, Tamil etc.
yet. This is about translation memory.

One of the things about MAT, whose use in the professional translator
community is still debated but most popular for translations of
time-dependent things like news, is that the original is often a very
rough translation that requires a _lot_ of editing. The biggest
problem is not the toolkit itself (with some exceptions - punctuation
and templates, for example) but the translators who do not bother to
use it properly, creating poor translations with lots of spelling
mistakes and leaving behind a wasteland of poor quality articles.

GTTK can be used as a force of good if someone puts in the appropriate
time and effort; when used _properly_ by a careful, knowledgeable
translator who gives ample time for proofreading, articles created
with it should be virtually indistinguishable from any other article.

It is my thought that the huge problem here is lack of engagement with
communities. Essentially, Google swooped down and started dropping
large amounts of poor quality content on our projects without engaging
the people from those communities. The people in Google's contest also
didn't engage the communities, nor did they respond to requests to
improve their content.

-m.


On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 7:18 AM, Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 2010/7/28 Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com>:
>> Just to be sure I understand...
>
> It's good that you ask, indeed. :-)
>
> No, it's not about free software, and the Wikimedians are not too
> snobby or lazy to correct poor language. That is what I frequently do
> in de.WP and eo.WP, and I suppose Ragib and many others as well. The
> point is: The machine translated articles are often so bad that I
> simply don't understand them. I *cannot* correct them, because I don't
> know what they are saying.
>
> Kind regards
> Ziko
>
>
>
> What's happening here is that human
>> beings, using a software tool, are translating articles from the
>> English Wikipedia into a variety of other languages and posting them
>> on the comparatively small Wikipedia projects in these languages. The
>> articles, of unknown intrinsic quality, are usually mid to low quality
>> translations.
>>
>> In the projects with an active community, some have rejected these
>> articles because they are not high quality and because the community
>> refuses to be responsible for fixing punctuation and other errors made
>> by editors who are not members of the community. In the projects
>> without an active community, Wikimedians (who may not speak any of the
>> languages affected by the Google initiative) are objecting for a
>> variety of other reasons - because the software used to assist
>> translation isn't free, because the effort is managed by a commercial
>> organization or because the endeavor wasn't cleared with the Wikimedia
>> community first. Some are also concerned that these new articles will
>> somehow deter new editors from becoming involved, despite clear
>> evidence that a larger base of content attracts more readers, and more
>> readers plus imperfect content leads to more editors.
>>
>> What I find interesting is that few seem to be interested in keeping
>> or improving the translated articles; Google's attempt to provide
>> content in under-served languages is actually offending Wikimedians,
>> despite our ostensible commitment to the same goal. Concerns like
>> bureaucratic pre-approval, using free software, etc. are somehow more
>> important than reaching more people with more content. It all seems
>> strange and un-Wikimedian like to me. Obviously there are things
>> Google should have done differently. Maybe working with them to
>> improve their process should be the focus here?
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Ziko van Dijk
> Niederlande
>
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