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

[Ziko van Dijk]

Has anybody more information about what Google exactly told the
people? A link? To whom was this call for participation directed?
This issue "Translation memory" is another problem, another divergency
of interests. We Wikipedians want to write good articles in our
languages, that often means that we do not translate 1:1 but shorten
and customize. But Google wants 1:1 translations for its Translation
memory. And, of course, its the big numbers Google is interested in to
achieve better automatic translations in the end.
Ziko



2010/7/29 Muhammad Yahia <shipmaster at gmail.com>:
> On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 6:56 PM, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> I heard that for the Swahili Wikipedia contest at least, they gave
>> away prizes... but perhaps they should've included a requirement that
>> the articles they created be rated as "good" by the community, not
>> full of errors and nonsense sentences, and that all project
>> participants who want any chance at winning must respond to all
>> talkpage messages within 72 hours (or something like that).
>>
>>
>>
> I have been involved with 2 big pushes by Google in the Arabic Wikipedia,
> one of them was by professional paid translators, the other was done
> completely by a volunteer organization in collaboration with Google. I
> supported both efforts heavily. In the latter, they recruited university
> students mostly to do the work and there was very little to earn beyond
> recognition. All the problems mentioned above plagued both efforts, and
> while the second one had slightly better results than the first, the vast
> amount of translated articles lay ignored in the user space (that's what
> the consensus on ar.wp was, confine them to their user space until deemed
> good), the efforts to contact and teach either the volunteers or the paid
> translators were futile, and the articles had some very awkward sentence
> structures, some very bad jargon translation, etc.
>
> I have reached the opinion that the gradual nature of collaboration in
> Wikipedia is what makes our good and excellent articles what they are. I
> think a very little percent of wikipedians started by writing a full length
> article, instead most of us started by a small edit in another article, and
> a bigger edit after it and so on. By the time we began writing whole
> articles, we had enough knowledge of the community and the wiki syntax to
> produce good results. Whenever someone has a question about terminology, it
> gets discussed on the VP, whenever someone is unsure, he recruits other
> people to review or help. This was all missing from the effort and I think
> what caused most of the problems.
>
> --
> Best Regards,
> Muhammad Yahia
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-- 
Ziko van Dijk
Niederlande