[WikiEN-l] [Wikipedia-l] [[WP:100K]] - who here writes well in English and another language?

[Carl Peterson]

On 9/21/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 21/09/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Yes, it's certainly an interesting idea, but it's usually a lot of hard
> work
> > to get a decent translation going. The article subject would have to be
> > interesting to keep me motivated.
>
>
> If you could pick an FA in another language and port it to the best
> English-language article you can, and let us know what sort of numbers
> of hours this takes, that would be most useful to know.
>
> (and, as Danny says, it beats arguing about people, process or policy)


While I know using online translators is discouraged, if a person is
familiar enough with a subject to be able to root out mistranslations and to
rewrite it as coherent English (good prose in one language doesn't
necessarily make good prose in another, hence the "it looses something in
the translation" cliche), then I don't see why familiarity with another
language is necessarily a requirement. I've found with the couple of
articles I've looked at through Google's translation service that it does a
passable job, especially if one is familiar with the the subject matter. The
nice thing about Google's translator is that if you click a link on the
translated page, the linked page will be translated for you as well.

Carl