[Wikimedia-l] Collaborative machine translation for Wikipedia -- proposed strategy

[Laura Hale]

On Saturday, July 27, 2013, David Cuenca wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 11:30 PM, C. Scott Ananian
> <cananian at wikimedia.org <javascript:;>>wrote:
>
> > This statement seems rather defeatist to me.  Step one of a machine
> > translation effort should be to provide tools to annotate parallel texts
> in
> > the various wikis, and to edit and maintain their parallelism.
>
>
> Scott, "edit and maintain" parallelism sounds wonderful on paper, until you
> want to implement it and then you realize that you have to freeze changes
> both in the source text and in the target language for it to happen, which
> is, IMHO against the very nature of wikis.
> Translate:Extension already does that in a way. I see it useful only for
> texts acting as a central hub for translations, like official
> communication. If that were to happen for all kind of content you would
> have to sacrifice the plurality of letting each wiki to do their own
> version.
>
>
Actually, this sort of translation service might be extremely useful for us
on Wikinews.  We have a fair amount of direct cross translation work from
one language to the other.  Our articles generally become non-editable
after a short period of time because of the nature of news reporting.
 There are issues for things like original reporting where getting say
original Czech language reporting outside the major news stories that
international media can easily sell for syndication do not get reported.
 Thus more local news from minority languages being shared... yeah, big
benefit for us. :)  There might be a few Wikinews language projects that
would be willing to sign on as beta testers for a collaborative translating
tool. :)  I think one of our regulars, Gryllida, has been trying to develop
a tool to make translating easier so it would fit really well with existing
project goals.

Sincerely,
Laura Hale


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