[Wikimedia-l] The case for supporting open source machine translation

[Mathieu Stumpf]

Le 2013-04-25 04:49, George Herbert a écrit :
> We can't usefully help with internet access (and that's proceeding at 
> good
> pace even in the third world), but language will remain a barrier 
> when
> people get access.  In a few situations politics / firewalling is as 
> well
> (China, primarily), which is another strategic challenge.  That, 
> however,
> is political and geopolitical, and not an easy nut for WMF to crack.  
> Of
> the three issues - net, firewalling, and language, one of them is 
> something
> we can work on.  We should think about how to work on that.  MT seems 
> like
> an obvious answer, but not the only possible one.

Do you have specific ideas in mind? Apart from having an "international 
language" and pedagogic material accessible to everyone and able to 
teach them from a zero knowledge requirement, I fail to see many 
options. Personally I'm currently learning esperanto as I would be happy 
to participate in such a process. I learn esperanto because it seems the 
current most successful language for such a project. It's already used 
on official china sites, and there's a current petition you can sign to 
make it an official european language[1].

[1] 
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/Esperanto_langue_officielle_de_lUE/


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