Having tried it tonight, I don't find the Google translator toolkit all that
useful, at least not at this present level of development. To sum up:
First you read their translation.
Then you scratch your head: What the deuce is that supposed to mean ...?
Then you check the original language version.
Then you compare the two.
Then you start wondering: How did *this* turn into *that*?
Then you shake your head.
(Note: everything up to this point is unproductive time.)
Then you look at the original again and try to translate it.
As you do, you invariably end up leaving the Google shite where it is and
writing your own text.
In the end, you delete the Google shite, and then, as you do so, you kick
yourself because there were two words in there that you needn't have typed
yourself.
Epic fail.
A.
--- On Wed, 28/7/10, Cool Hand Luke <user.coolhandl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> From: Cool Hand Luke <user.coolhandl...@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Push translation
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Wednesday, 28 July, 2010, 0:27
> Mass machine translations ("pushing"
> them onto other projects that may or
> may not want them) is a very bad idea.
>
> Beginning in 2004-05, a non-native speaker on en.wp decided
> that he should
> import slightly-cleaned babelfish translations of foreign
> language articles
> that did not have articles on the English wikipedia.
> They were almost
> uniformly horrid, and required many volunteer hours to
> clean up (I believe
> some were simply deleted). The user had to be restrained
> from importing
> additional articles in this manner.
>
> I would not want to impose cleanup jobs upon users who did
> not volunteer for
> them. In other words, I think the "pull" method of
> translation is not a
> bug--it's a feature--it ensures that a competent native
> speaker is willing
> and able to satisfactorily port an article to a different
> language.
>
> That said, if someone wants to develop a tool to aid
> "pullers" by making a
> first-pass translation of the wikitext of an article, I
> think that would be
> an unambiguously good thing.
>
> Frank
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