[Foundation-l] Free translation memory

[Nikola Smolenski]

Дана Thursday 29 July 2010 10:38:20 Samuel Klein написа:
> There is definitely a "free TM" project waiting to happen.  It would
> be nice to see translatewiki [for instance] incorporate such a tool,
> but it may be a nontrivial amount of work.

At Project Rastko for years now there is the idea of building something called 
Global Translation Project, where volunteers could collaboratively translate 
texts in a manner somewhat similar to Distributed Proofreaders.

To give some detail: the idea is to first parse the original text with a 
rule-based machine translation engine (of course this should be free software 
with free dictionary). The basic problem that these engines have is that they 
are unable to resolve ambiguities in the text (a classic example is 
sentence "Time flies like an arrow": does it means that time is flying as 
fast as an arrow or that there exist some insects called time flies (like 
there are fruit flies) which like some arrow?). This often ends in a 
mistranslation.

The crux of the idea is that it would be humans who resolve ambiguities in 
this step. For example, these two possible meanings of the sentence would in 
another language be translated to two completely different sentences. A human 
could then simply pick the correct one. After several people have done this 
for several independent languages, and their translations agree, the system 
would know what is the correct parsing of the original text. Then this 
parsing could be translated fully automatically to a large number of 
languages, and it will be highly likely that the translations will be close 
to correct.

An offshoot of this is a crowdsourced dictionary project in GalaxyZoo style. 
Instead of doing battle with Wiktionary's or similar interface, volunteers 
could build a dictionary by solving various simple tasks (say, pick a word's 
gender, or verify that a word is correctly declined); if the supermajority of 
the volunteers gives the same answer, the word enters the dictionary.