[Wikimediaindia-l] Need more info on Google's Translation Toolkit

[Mahitgar from Marathi Wikipedia]

Tamil Wikipedians seems to have worked on this , Whether this is experimented by any other Indian Wikipedia ?

July 15th, 2010

			
			
				Earlier today the folks over at Google provided an update on their progress using Translation Toolkit
 with volunteers and translators to improve the article count in smaller
 language versions of Wikipedia, including Arabic, Gujarati, Hindi, 
Kannada, Swahili, Tamil and Telugu.  Google is a passionate believer in 
the need to translate and bring more high quality works of text to 
less-represented languages on the web.
Michael Galvez, a Product Manager from Google, presented the recent findings of these efforts at this year’s Wikimania in Gdańsk – which wrapped up on Sunday, July 11 of this year.
From Michael’s post:
We believe that translation is key to our mission of making information useful to everyone. For example, Wikipedia
 is a phenomenal source of knowledge, especially for speakers of common 
languages such as English, German and French where there are hundreds of
 thousands—or millions—of articles available. For many smaller 
languages, however, Wikipedia doesn’t yet have anywhere near the same 
amount of content available.
Google is reporting an increase of about 16 million words so far due 
to the efforts of local volunteers and translators using the Translation
 Toolkit.  In Hindi Wikipedia these efforts have resulted in an increase
 in size of about 20 per cent. They continue their work directly with 
volunteers from these language projects, and continue to expand the 
capabilities of the translation toolkit in new languages.
A big thanks for the ongoing efforts of the volunteers and 
translators, and to Google for continuing to invest time and resources 
in this great translation system.
Jay Walsh, Communications

								
				
					
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	4 Responses to “Update on Translation Toolkit”

	
			contractors tax Says:
						


			July 15th, 2010 at 06:25 

			Google’s translation work is amazing, world changing to a degree. I
 have friends in Hungary and Russia who write to me entire emails in 
their own language. I can use the google translate and their letters 
appear in highly readable english. And I can reply. And in chrome it is 
possible to translate webpages on the fly. Amazing. Game changing. 
Thanks to google, wikipedia etc for bringing me closer to my friends!

Nathan C., UK

		
			Tobias (User:Church of emacs) Says:
						


			July 15th, 2010 at 17:46 

			Great project!
I don’t know much about this tool, so please forgive me if my 
question is stupid: Most “big” Wikipedia language versions are quite 
strict in copyright issues, e.g. respecting the license and attributing 
authors properly. Large efforts, like transwikiimport or importupload 
are taken to ensure that translated articles contain the history of the 
original page. So my question is: how does author attribution work with 
the google toolkit? Are the authors of the original article properly 
attributed? Is the history imported?
Seeing that this is a medium/large software project, one would expect
 that license issues are considered as well. On the other hand, 
Wikipedia versions evolve as they grow, and usually they develop an 
understanding for copyright issues in late parts of the project – so 
“write articles first, care about copyright later” is a valid argument. 
Additionally, GFDL was much stricter than CC-BY-SA, so the strictness of
 policies (which sometimes require a copy of the page history) might not
 be needed anymore; I’m not sure about that.

		
			A. Ravishankar Says:
						


			July 20th, 2010 at 00:26 

			Please also see
What happened on the Google Challenge @ the Swahili Wikipedia
A Review on Google Translation project in Tamil Wikipedia

		
			Mayooresan Says:
						


			July 21st, 2010 at 11:16 

			Google’s Tool Kit is a amazing tool but is it acceptable to allow 
Google to use Wikipedia as a testing platform for their project???. 
Obviously they encourage people to translate using Toolkit because they 
want more “Translation Memory” in many languages. I personally believe 
we should not encourage such efforts where GNU project and its 
volunteers should not be used for a proprietary reserved product. 
The problem denoted by the Swahili language Wikipedia is so scary… Too much of anything is not good!!

		

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