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

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
When we invest in MT it is to convey knowledge, information and primarily
Wikipedia articles. They do not have the same problems poetry has. With
explanatory articles on a subject there is a web of associated concepts.
These concepts are likely to occur in any language if the subject exists in
that other language.

Consequently MT can work for Wikipedia and provide quite a solid
interpretation of what the article is about. This is helped when the
associated concepts are recognised as such and when the translations for
these concepts are used in the MT.
Thanks,
      GerardM


On 26 April 2013 10:38, Mathieu Stumpf <psychoslave at culture-libre.org>wrote:

> Le 2013-04-25 20:56, Theo10011 a écrit :
>
>  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.
>>
>
> To my mind, there's no such thing as "absolute" meaning. It's all about
> intrepretation in a given a context by a given interpreter. I mean, I do
> think that MT could probably be as good as a profesional translators. But
> even profesional translators can't make "perfect translations". I already
> gave the example of poetry, but you may also take example of humour, which
> ask for some cultural background, otherwise you have to explain why it's
> funny and you know that you have to explain a joke, it's not a joke.
>
>
>  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.
>>
>
> That's just how learning process work, you can't "understand" something
> you didn't experiment. Reading an algorithm won't give you the insight
> you'll get when you process it mentaly (with the help of pencil and paper)
> and a textual description of "making love" won't provide you the feeling it
> provide.
>
>
>
>  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.
>>
>
> English have many so called "non-neutral" problems. As far as I know, if
> the goal is to use syntactically unambiguous human language, lojban is the
> best current candidate. English as an international language is a very
> harmful situation. Believe it or not, but I sometime have to translate to
> English sentences which are written in French, because the writer was
> thinking with English idiomatic locution that he poorly translated to
> French, its native language in which it doesn't know the idiomatic
> locution. Even worst, I red people which where where using concepts with an
> English locution because they never matched it with the French locution
> that they know. And in the other way, I'm not sure that having millions of
> people speaking a broken English is a wonderful situation for this language.
>
> Search "why not english as international language" if you need more
> documentation.
>
>
> --
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> http://www.culture-libre.org/
>
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