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.
TradWiki/WikiTran (WikipediaTranslator/WikiTranslator/BabelWiki) is a wiki that will be coded to help wikipedians translate articles from English to other languages.
- I prefer Wikibabel, in a similar way to WIKIpedia, WIKIspecies and so on.
- How about Wikitongues? - FrancisTyers 21:21, 16 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
License
All code and data should be released under a free licence (GPL for code, GFDL for text).
Advantages
- faster translation of wikipedia
- generation of large amounts of useful data (corpora).
- creation of a useful tool
TradWiki/WikiTran - Translation memory approach
A Translation Memory is a computer program that uses a database of old translations to help a human translator. If this approach is followed, WikipediaTranslator will need the following features:
- visualization of translated and original versions
- split of original versions on several parts for individual translation
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
- It would be interesting the user could click on every word in an article to link to the wiktionary definition, if there is not an inside wikipedia article. And indicate to the software to translate the word into another language ( using the right mouse clicking).
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.
- Yes, a database of idioms
- You mean like a w:translation memory system?
Resources:
- General
- Dictionaries
- Dutch to English Translation Tools (source available)
- English dictionary
- Portuguese dictionary
- English-Portuguese dictionary
- Ergane (free dictionary, several languages)
- WWWJDIC (English-Japanese/Japanese-English dictionary)
- Papillon project (free multilingual dictionary buillt by computational linguists)
- All Free Dictionaries Project - Dicts.info
- Unfortunately none of these projects seem to have been updated since around 2003.
- 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)
- 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.
Links
- general
- Visual Interactive Syntax Learning: http://visl.sdu.dk/visl/
- wikipedia articles
- Free translations on the web
- Neural nets
- Machine translation
- Translations memories
- wired magazine
- Portuguese
- Meta-language
- http://www.undl.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)
References:
Discussion
See the talk:Wikipedia Machine Translation Project page.
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