On 08/05/2010 03:12 PM, Michael Galvez wrote: > Sorry for coming into this discussion a bit late. I'm one of the members of > Google's translation team, and I wanted to make myself available for > feedback/questions.
This is an unusual and most welcome step for Google. When I first learned about GTTK in June 2009, I used it to translate a handful of articles from English to Swedish. I'm glad that it's now also possible to translate into English, but some of the errors are still there. It's a great tool, and should be used more. We have a common interest in improving it. But for this, wikipedians need feedback. Which language pairs are most active? What words or phrases does GTTK find problematic, and can we somehow improve that? Google could benefit so much from collaborating with wikipedians. Ultimately, Google could share some translation dictionaries, so we could include them in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Users of Gmail or Google Apps want their privacy, but users who translate Wikipedia articles are already sharing their results, so Google could help us to find each other and make us collaborate. Translations that start from a Wikipedia article could by default be put in a shared pool where other wikipedians can find them. To some details: I need a way to mark in the original text that a phrase is a quote, book title or noun proper that shouldn't be translated, but copied literally. And in the statistics, those words should not be counted as untranslated and block me from publishing the result. Optimally, GTTK would learn over time where such literal phrases occur, e.g. text in italics under the ==Bibliography== section. English ==References== corresponds to Swedish ==Källor==, even though the two words are not direct translations. GTTK was pretty quick to pick this up. However, the different styles we use for the opening paragraph of biographic articles, using parenthesis around the birth and death dates in the English Wikipedia, but not in some other languages, is something GTTK has not yet learned. Categories should not be translated, but GTTK should follow the interwiki links for categories. If none exist, perhaps suggest a parent category. Even for articles that already exist in the target language, we often need to translate another section. For example, the Swedish Wikipedia might have an article about Afghanistan with a good section about its geography, but the history section needs improvement, and could be translated from another language. The work-around is to begin a translation of the whole article, but only translate the relevant part and then cut-and-paste into the target without submitting through GTTK. Perhaps GTTK could bring up both articles side by side and suggest which sections are in most dire need of improvement? -- Lars Aronsson (l...@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l