[Wikipedia-l] multilingual wikipedia

[Mark Williamson]

You mean "ec" ;)


On Wed, 03 Nov 2004 11:53:50 -0800, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Mattis Manzel wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> > I'd like to propose a new Wikipedia: "the multilingual wikipedia"
> >
> > Some ideas about how to do that are on
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_communication
> >
> > I would be very interested in getting the multilingual features of
> > oddmuse (the colored background, the language filters) ported to
> > Mediawiki and then start working on two things:
> >
> > A) Elaborate the engine to make it work for multilingual pages:
> > language filters also in the edit mode, inclusion of automatic
> > pretranslation in a new translate-mode, etc.
> > B) Start making the "multilingual wikipedia". Kinda getting people
> > into the fun of translation.
> >
> > Hopefully this wouldn't require a fork of Mediawiki. Unfortunately I
> > have a vage feeling that it does. In that case I propose as a name for
> > the multilingual Mediawiki engine: MMediawiki ;)
> >
> > But who knows?  Maybe things are easier than I think?
> 
> Or more difficult.  I think the idea is full of naïve optimism about
> translation in general, and machine translation in particular.  Begin
> with an English text and translate it into another language.  Have
> someone else, who cannot see the original, translate it back into
> English.  Compare the two English versions.  The difference can be amazing.
> 
> On another level, articles on the same subject are often separately
> developed in each language.  This can often result in having stable
> NPOVs in each language that are different, frequently in the wake of
> careful negotiation over the exact meaning of a word.  Reconciling these
> could be extremely difficult.  I can easily imagine that attitudes
> toward US foreign policy might not be as conflicted when written in many
> languages other than English.
> En
> 
> 
> 
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