[WikiEN-l] BBC English, Simple English Wikipedia and the news.

[Gordon Joly]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/

I did a little research by asking somebody with who I worked with at 
BBC Worldservice between 1995 and 1998. I was in BBC Wordlservice for 
short period in 1998, starting in "BBC Networking Club" in 1995. He 
said that the BBC News in Simple English was produced between 1988 
(or 1989) and 1994. The news in Simple English (Basic English) was 
stopped since it was very difficult to take news, translate into 
Basic English and the transmit before the news became "stale". The 
aims and objectives of BBC Worldservice allowed the translation, but 
resources allowed were strictly limited: specialists in Basic English 
had to be employed on this news service.

In relation to the Simple English Wikipedia 
http://simple.wikipedia.org/ similar considerations apply. How many 
Basic English experts are able to spend time translating 1,000,000 
pages (1,000,000,000 words) or start from scratch?

-- 
Gordo (aka LoopZilla)
gordon.joly at pobox.com
http://pobox.com/~gordo/
http://www.loopzilla.org/