[Wikipedia-l] Re: Africa info

[Sabine Cretella]

Tomer Chachamu wrote:

>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
>  
>
I fully agree with the fact that translation is far more compilcated 
than many think - babelfish does not at all do the trick ;-)

Never ever a machine will be able to translate correctly - not now, not 
tomorrow, not in 100 years - it's a dream many have - sorry, I must 
destroy it. A spoken and "living" language changes style and partly even 
writing and grammar at least every 20 years. It's an evolutionary 
process and a machine translator will only be as good as the human who 
fed it. It can give raw translations, but they will never be perfect. 
Often the same sentence used in another context needs a different 
translation as it has a different meaning. So whatever anyone thinks or 
belives: you will always need human beings to transmit a concept from 
one language to the other.

My 2 cts.

Sabine
(professional translator - and not even a bit worrying about computers 
taking over high qualified work :-) go ahead programming machine 
translation software - thank you! - you help me to show that humans are 
the better translators and are woth every cent a customer pays :-)