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

[Mark]

On 5/1/13 3:39 PM, David Cuenca wrote:
> In answer to Matthieu, I don't think perfection is something to aim for
> during the first stage. Just a MT that gives a fairly good text about the
> subject without big mistakes, would be already a big improvement. IMHO,
> goals should be set step by step and at a reasonable height. The lowest
> hanging fruit seems to be pairs of closely related languages, tolerating
> instances like the one you pointed out.
>
I agree with that, especially from the perspective of improving the 
state of free/libre tools. There are many things that are beyond the 
capabilities of current state-of-the-art MT, but current free/libre 
tools aren't even up to that level: proprietary cloud tools like Google 
Translate and Bing Translate appear to be the most advanced currently 
available, and certainly the only easy-for-end-users advanced tools 
available. If free/libre tools could get up to that level, that would be 
a big win in itself.

-Mark