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List:       opensuse-translation
Subject:    [opensuse-translation] Re: [opensuse-project] Re: [opensuse-marketing] Call for help translation of
From:       Jos Poortvliet <jos () opensuse ! org>
Date:       2012-09-27 9:38:44
Message-ID: 1598837.KtF0pCszXu () linux-6upc
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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".
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