Machine translation

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The purpose of the Wikipedia Machine Translation Project is to develop ideas, methods and tools that can help translate Wikipedia articles from one language to another (particularly out of English and into languages with small numbers of fluent speakers). 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. But manual translation can be added later, for a more accurate text. Interlingua approach A different, but related approach would be translating articles by hand into Rick Morneau's interlingua for machine translation, then writing software modules to translate automatically from that interlingua into each target language. This only saves work with respect to direct translation if there are several target languages whose modules are well enough developed, but those modules are much easier to write than full real-language to real-language automatic translation systems. TradWiki/WikiTran Main article: Translation Wiki TradWiki/WikiTran (WikipediaTranslator/WikiTranslator/BabelWiki) is a wiki that will be coded to help wikipedians translate articles from English to other languages. I rather like WikiTran myself. --Stephen Gilbert I prefer Wikibabel, in a similar way to WIKIpedia, WIKIspecies and so on. How about Wikitongues? - FrancisTyers 21:21, 16 October 2005 (UTC) Translating between closely related languages I would imagine it would be an easier task to translate between similar languages than non-similar ones. For example, we have Wikipedias in Catalan and Spanish and Macedonian and Bulgarian, perhaps even Dutch and Afrikaans (some more studies would have to be done to evaluate which would be most appropriate). There is some free software being produced in Spain called en:Apertium that might be useful here. - FrancisTyers 21:44, 2 March 2006 (UTC) Another possibility of such a translation would be to customize the text to the user. English from US and England are quite different, and the user will feel it. The same with Spanish from Spain and from Mexico. Such an adaption would make the user comfortable Resources: General Fagan Finder Translation Wizard - single interface to many free online translators Dictionaries Dutch to English Translation Tools (source available) English dictionary Ispell Wiktionary http://dict.leo.org Portuguese dictionary Ispell English-Portuguese dictionary Ergane (free dictionary, several languages) http://download.travlang.com/Ergane/frames-en.html WWWJDIC (English-Japanese/Japanese-English dictionary) http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/wwwjdic.html Papillon project (free multilingual dictionary buillt by computational linguists) http://www.papillon-dictionary.org/Home.po Chinese, English, Estonian, French, German, Japanese, Lao, Malay, Thaï All Free Dictionaries Project - Dicts.info http://www.dicts.info/ 37 interconnected languages - 417,521 entries - 1000+ multilingual dictionaries English-Chinese http://us.dict.cn/en/ online non-commercial English-Chinese Translation rules Code Unfortunately none of these projects seem to have been updated since around 2003, except for Apertium (see below) Interlingua Translator (Translator under LGPL) http://intertrans.sourceforge.net/ Translate every text in an abstract unique digital Interlingua (Parser) Translate the Interlingua to the new text (Generator) Written in Java 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. Actually this isn't machine translation, it is a literal word-for-word translation Download code at http://www.translator.cx/dist/ Linguaphile (Translator under GPL) http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net/ open source, platform independent, and programmed in perl simplistic and easy to use command line translator 56 languages Download code at http://www.translator.cx/dist/ Traduki C/Lua-based project, uses the metalanguage approach with Esperanto for lexycal content (to some extent) Project restarted in 2003, current being developed http://traduki.sourceforge.net (version 0.2 released, and translates "The dog eats the apple" to Esperanto: "La hundo mangxas la pomon") I like the idea use traduki. One can use traduki keys to stablish relations between words in different languages. I.e. hundo is the key to en:dog, es:perro and so on. So, going to hundo, you can add another translation to other lnnguages, without add language: links in the es:perro article, for example. Apertium Apertium is an open-source platform (engine, tools) to build machine translation systems, mainly between related languages. Code, documentation, language pairs available from the Apertium website. http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/ -- Link Grammar Databases http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/links/ -- WordNet, a lexical database for the English language. 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 Machine translation Language translation Translation Free translations on the web http://anglahindi.iitk.ac.in/ http://www.google.com/language_tools (uses Systran software) http://www.freetranslation.com/ http://www.systransoft.com/ http://babelfish.altavista.com/ (uses Systran software) http://www.babylon.com/ http://www.translationbooth.com/C1.e1/freeTranslation/index.html 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 (at least somewhat Systran software) http://www.nifty.com/globalgate/ Japanese http://www.au-kbc.org/research_areas/nlp/demo/mat/ (A Tamil to Hindi MT system developed in AU-KBC Research Centre, Chennai) http://onlinefordito.micom.hu Hungarian http://www.webforditas.hu Hungarian Neural nets Machine translation Translations memories wired magazine Wired 8.05: Machine Translation's Past and Future Wired 8.05: Universal Translators Wired 8.05: Talking to Strangers 4.10: Geek Page - Using interlinguas to map between languages Portuguese Processamento Computacional do Português http://www.linguateca.pt/index.html Meta-language http://www.undl.org (the new link is http://www.undlfoundation.org )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 project is now an independent organization. The World Wide Translator (The Tragedy of the Anticommons of translations memories) http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/01/09/wo_leo092101.asp References: A Word-to-Word Model of Translational Equivalence Discussion See the talk:Wikipedia Machine Translation Project page.