[Wikimedia-l] Human-assisted machine translation (it was: "The case for supporting open source machine translation")

[Mathieu Stumpf]

Ha, I just met a good example of a text you may hardly translate with MT
means.

Look at this text which come from [1]:

The term "manifold" comes from German Mannigfaltigkeit, by Riemann. In
Romance languages, this is translated as "variety" – such spaces with a
differentiable structure are called "analytic varieties", while spaces
with an algebraic structure are called "algebraic varieties". In
English, "manifold" refers to spaces with a differentiable or
topological structure, while "variety" refers to spaces with an
algebraic structure, as in algebraic varieties.

This is a good example because cleary in German you obviously won't say
that Mannigfaltigkeit come from the German Mannigfaltigkeit. Also if you
translate it to a Romance language like French you won't formulate this
paragraph in the same way.

Well, it doesn't add more to what I already said, but it probably give a
more concrete example of MT limits.


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_manifolds_and_varieties