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

[Theo10011]

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 7:56 PM, Denny Vrandečić <
denny.vrandecic at wikimedia.de> wrote:

> Not just bootstrapping the content. By having the primary content be saved
> in a language independent form, and always translating it on the fly, it
> would not merely bootstrap content in different languages, but it would
> mean that editors from different languages would be working on the same
> content. The texts in the different language is not a translation of each
> other, but they are all created from the same source. There would be no
> primacy of, say, English.
>

This is a thought but I've never heard of a Language independent form. I
also question its importance to your core idea vs. say, a primary language
of choice. An argument can be made that language independent on a computer
medium can't exist, down to a programming language, the instructions and
even binary bits, there is a language running on top of higher inputs (even
transitioning between computer languages isn't at an absolute level)- to
that extent, I wonder if data can truly be language independent.

As far as Linguistic typology goes, it's far too unique and too varied to
have a language independent form develop as easily. Perhaps it also depends
on the perspective. For example, the majority of people commenting here
(Americans, Europeans) might have exposure to a limited set of a linguistic
branch. Machine-translations as someone pointed out, are still not
preferred in some languages, even with years of research and potentially
unlimited resources at Google's disposal, they still come out sounding
clunky in some ways. And perhaps they will never get to the level of
absolute, where they are truly language independent. If you read some of
the discussions in linguistic relativity (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), there is
research to suggest that a language a person is born with dictates their
thought processes and their view of the world - there might not be
absolutes when it comes to linguistic cognition. There is something
inherently unique in the cognitive patterns of different languages.

Which brings me to the point, why not English? Your idea seems plausible
enough even if your remove the abstract idea of complete language
universality, without venturing into the science-fiction labyrinth of
man-machine collaboration.

Regards
Theo