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

[Mark Williamson]

I'm not sure that's exactly the question. Rather, by using GTTK,
people are contributing to building [[Translation memory]] for Google,
which they can in turn use to build their statistical models. It's not
that we're using non-free software, but rather that we're contributing
to it.

-m.

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 1:09 PM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Fajro wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 8:38 PM, Ragib Hasan <ragibhasan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> (The tool used was Google Translation Toolkit. (not Google Translate).
>>> There is a distinction between these two tools. Google Translation
>>> Toolkit (GTT) is a translation-memory based semi-manual translation
>>> tool. That is, it learns translation skills as you gradually translate
>>> articles by hand. Later, this can be used to automate translation.)
>>>
>> Another issue: The resulting translation memory is not free
>
> This is a red herring.  Some real and important issues have been raised
> about machine translations, but this is not one of them.
>
> The fact that the source codes for the translation processes are not
> free does not make the results of such machine translations unfree.  Key
> to anything being copyright is that material must be original and not
> the result of a mechanical process.  Machine translations are mechanical
> processes.  Another person using the same software with the same text
> should have the same results.
>
> It is also important that the allegedly infringing text must have been
> fixed in some medium.  A person issuing a take down order must show, as
> an necessary element of that order, where the material in question was
> previously published.  Two identical texts by different authors need not
> be copies of each other.  With human efforts two such identical texts
> are highly improbable, but this need not be the case with machine
> translation. Indeed if the same software keeps producing different
> results I would question its reliability.
>
> Ray
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>