[opensuse-wiki] Re: [opensuse-project] Re: [opensuse-marketing] Call for help translation of osc'12 program announcement

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 wrote:

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On Tuesday 2012-09-11 23:20, Tony Su wrote:

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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".