[Wikipedia-l] Re: Africa info

[Tomer Chachamu]

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 18:32:59 +0200, Andy Rabagliati <andyr at wizzy.com> wrote:
> If we plug away at the en: wikipedia, adding African-related articles,
> maybe a couple of years down the line we will be able to automatically
> translate to Xhosa. I think that is a /much/ better use of everyone's
> time than writing a Xhosa wikipedia.

I think not. As your KDE example showed, translation is far more
complicated than simple dictionary lookups. Xhosa is only spoken by
7.9m speakers (mainly in South Africa) and with so few speakers (and
so little commercial possibility for making a translator) I would
imagine that Xhosa may never be able to be translated.

Actually, I just read that it is similar to Zulu, which probably adds
some more "speakers". Still, I think development of a machine
translation program is unlikely.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_translation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language