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.
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@inai.de>
wrote:
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".