Everything you suggest is possible and I'm of course willing to setup any demo people may be interested in. The main thing is I would want some kind of concensus from "The Powers that Be" there would be some kind of future if it really solves the problem satisfactorly, no one wants to waste time on something that can't happen.

The reason why I used the term "shepherding" is because I am always interested in building something that can live independently of myself-- I'm not looking to make myself indispensible, from the first day of anything I do I'm looking to bring on others who want to build the same thing. Also, awhile back I started penciling out what mass Translation for openSUSE might become. Yes, all things start small. But, if this becomes important to more people in openSUSE, I'd like to involve anyone who wants this to enhance what they do and avoid being unable to deliver. Tony On Sep 27, 2012 2:38 AM, "Jos Poortvliet" <jos(a)opensuse.org> wrote: > On Wednesday 26 September 2012 15:18:09 Tony Su wrote: > > Hello Jan (and whoever else receives this, I'm not subscribed to all > > the mail-lists on CC) > > > > Yes, it's quite possible that the initial translations might not be > > "good enough" -- and ultimately since machine translations today still > > cannot usually provide better than word for word literal word > > substitution, "good enough" is probably best defined as understandable > > although not with the smooth idiomatic linguistic structures that can > > best be provided by a human being. > > > > What machine translation can provide is the ability to get the proper > > meaning across, to communicate an idea properly. And, if human > > resources aren't available, this is better than no communication at > > all. > > > > As for accuracy... Particularly for short, "standard expressions" that > > crop up again and again in the types of documents we produce, > > Web-based translations provide a means for anyone to submit an > > improvement or correction. Assuming that Google or Microsoft or > > whoever is used as the Translation Partner properly evaluates, accepts > > and implements suggestions for future use of the same expression, we > > should expect that within rather short order future documents should > > be translated extremely well. > > > > If there is any interest in openSUSE/SUSE to investiggate the > > capabilities of this technology, a project should be designated that > > can properly evaluate whether machine translation is worthless or > > promising and if desired I am willing to shepherd it. > > 'shepherd' or 'do' ;-) > > I wouldn't know what would be needed to actually TEST this out - but > you're right that there are plenty of pages not translated in plenty of > languages. > > Quite a few of our sites are in github, maybe you can set up a test > version with a translation system of, say, openbuildservice.org: fork > https://github.com/openSUSE/o-b-s.org and add the translation system, > then run it somewhere so ppl can check it out. If it's better than what > we have (and from your comments I take it it will be) you can just make > a merge request to the github repo and the maintainers get it up. And > done, one down, a dozen to go :D > > Then there is the wiki. How do we support our translators with this, can > google translate be helpful for that? For example, maybe it is possible > to have an auto-translate run over our wiki pages so all pages get > translations > in say the basic 25 languages or so. Then people can edit as things used > to are... > > Is that possible? Is there a mediawiki tool which can crawl our > en.opensuse.org wiki and, for pages that have no de.opensuse.org, > fr.opensuse.org etc etc equivalents, create and fill them? If you 'just' > manage to do that, our wiki has become far more accessible to non-native > speakers... > > Cheers, > Jos > > > Tony > > > > On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 1:46 AM, Jan Engelhardt <jengelh(a)inai.de>

> > > On Tuesday 2012-09-11 23:20, Tony Su wrote: > > >>Highly recommend posting machine-translated copy using either Google > > >>Translate(http://translate.google.com/) or Microsoft > > >>Translate(http://www.bing.com/translator) > > >> > > >>Both are free and only take seconds then ask for a native speaker > > >>review to clean up any idioms and colloquials. > > >> > > > The time to weed out the bugs of automatic translation is close to > > > doing a non-automated, more targeted translation. Especially the > > > farther east you go on the globe (Japanese TL with Google is pretty > > > much unusable in either direction) and/or dealing with > > > highly-technical words (and fillers) - which the announcement is in > > > no > > > way short of, like "Call For Papers", "to keynote", "to kick off", > > > "workshop", "track", "session", "usability expert", and (obviousisms > > > like) "speakers talking".