Machine translation
The purpose of the Wikipedia Machine Translation Project is to develop ideas, methods and tools that can help translate Wikipedia to non-english languages.
Motivation
Small languages can't produce articles as fast as english wikipedia because the number of wikipedians is too low. The solution for this problem is the translation of english wikipedia. But, some languages will not have enough translators. Machine Translation can improve the productivity of the community.
TradWiki/WikiTran
TradWiki/WikiTran (WikipediaTranslator/WikiTranslator/BabelWiki) is a to be coded wiki that helps wikipedians to translate articles from english to other languages.
- I rather like WikiTran myself. --Stephen Gilbert
License
All code and data should be released under a free licence
Advantages
- faster translation of wikipedia
- generation of large amounts of useful data (corpora).
- creation of an useful tool
Lexical, syntactic and semantic analysis of wikipedia content
The first step for wikipedia translation is the analysis of wikipedia's content. This analysis will determine:
- Number of words and sentences
- Words distribution
- Frequency of the most popular sentences and expressions
- Semantic relations between words and between sentences
- Syntactic analysis of all sentences
Information about the most popular sentences and expressions can be used to create a translation database of such expressions so translators don't need to repeat a translation.
Resources:
- Dictionaries
- Dutch to English Translation Tools (source available)
- English dictionary
- Portuguese dictionary
- English-Portuguese dictionary
- Ergane (free dictionary, several languages)
- Translation rules
- Code
- GPLTran (Translator under GPL)
- http://www.translator.cx
- Supposed to translate paragraphs or entire webpapges
- Paragraph translation is spotty and buggy
- Web translation doesn't seem to work at all.
- Download code at http://www.translator.cx/dist/
- http://www.translator.cx
- Traduki
- Python-based project, uses Esperanto as a metalanguage
- Website hasn't been updated in while
- http://traduki.sourceforge.net (version 0.2 released, and translates "The dog eats the apple" to Esperanto: "La hundo mangxas la pomon")
- http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/ -- Link Grammar
- GPLTran (Translator under GPL)
- Databases
- http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/links/ -- WordNet, a lexical database for the English language.
TradWiki/WikiTran - Translation memory aproach
A Translation Memory is a computer program that uses a database of old translations to help a human translator. If this aproach is followed, WikipediaTranslator will need the following features:
- visualization of translated and original versions
- split of original versions on several parts for individual translation
Links
- general
- Links on Machine Translation (MT): http://www.ife.dk/url-mt.htm
- Machine translation (MT), and the future of the translation industry http://accurapid.com/journal/15mt.htm
- Machine Translation: an Introductory Guide: http://clwww.essex.ac.uk/MTbook/
- Visual Interactive Syntax Learning: http://visl.sdu.dk/visl/
- wikipedia articles
- Free translations on the web
- http://www.google.com/language_tools
- http://www.freetranslation.com/
- http://www.systransoft.com/
- http://babelfish.altavista.com/ (uses Systran software)
- http://www.babylon.com/
- http://www.translator.cx (GPLTran)
- http://www.reverso.net/textonly/default_ie.asp
- http://www.worldlingo.com/en/microsoft/computer_translation.html Works good, many languages
- Neural nets
- Machine translation
- Translations memories
- wired magazine
- Portuguese
- Processamento Computacional do Português http://www.portugues.mct.pt/index.html
- Meta-language
- http://www.unl.ias.unu.edu A United Nations project based on an artificial, machine-readable language (UNL). The idea is to semi-automatically create a UNL text from, say, English, then have it fully-automatically translated in up to 150 languages on-the-fly.
- The World Wide Translator (The Tragedy of the Anticommons of translations memories)
References:
Are you sure the other language wikipedias would rather translate text than write it themselves? It seems to me that it's almost more effort to translate text than to write an article yourself. For instance, I run the Esperanto wikipedia and I think we appreciate the international nature of our articles. I was wondering if other second-language wikipedias would feel the same way. I mean do the other language wikipedias want it?
It's true that the effort to write articles is almost the same as the effort to translate. But there are some exceptions. If you are not an expert in the topic, it's easier to translate than to write. On the other hand, it's clear to me that the number of contributers to the portuguese encyclopedia is very small. You must consider the fact that portuguese is not a second-language, but the first language of milions of people. Unfortunaly very few of those millions have access to the internet and/or have an education. A free encyclopedia would be an extraordinary resource for tose people, so everuy effort to speed the creation of portugurese version is welcomed. Of course, people that write to a second language wikipedia like Vikipedio, have diferent purposes, do it for fun and are not interested in Machine Translation.
PS-You may be interested in knowing that the Traduki project uses esperanto for the deeper word representation to achieve machine translation. user:joao
Point well made. It would be especially good for the minority languages. I was aware of the Traduki project and it looks interesting although it looks like nothing has happened on the project lately... maybe I'm wrong. I actually looked at the pages again yesterday. ...and since I'm going to start learning Portuguese soon (I plan to visit Brazil next August), I'll probably take a closer look at it later. I now know Sim, N~ao and Obrigado. :)
Now that I think more about it I'd like to see auto-translation so I can get rough translations of encyclopedias in non-English, non-Esperanto language wikipedias. Seems like in a future version we could have a drop down list on each page that could translate a page for us and also give a link to the article on another language wikipedia if it exists. I'm think there's already free services that do this, does anyone know? --Chuck Smith
There are some links to such services above under "Free translations on the web" Joao
Has anyone seen Google Translate at http://translate.google.com/translate_t ?
Would a automatical translation script be run only once for each article, multiple times at an interval, immediately when changes are made or immediately on demand by a reader? If only once or by an interval, how would article conficts be handled? 24.198.63.192 03:52 Oct 18, 2002 (UTC)
- How about never, because machine translation produces utterly crap results? There are plenty of crap online translators out there that people can feed pages into if they simply must; I don't think we should encourage it that much. --Brion VIBBER 06:01 Oct 18, 2002 (UTC)
- Seconded! -- Tarquin
Yeah, I'm not so big on the idea anymore either. I do think it's interesting as an extremely long term project, though.
Machine translation can give the best of both worlds:
- point your machine translator at the english version (probably) and get local language version with the most content, with a slight US/European bias.
- point your normal browser at your own language version, and get (sometimes) less content, but more readable, and with local bias, as well as local-specific content. [User:Willsmith]