[haiku-development] Re: [haiku-doc] Re: Machine translation (was: Re: Wiki for translation/localization teams)
- From: "Jonas Sundström" <jonas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:05:11 +0100 CET
Sean Healy <jalopeura@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
...
> That's why I wanted to be sure everyone realized the work
> involved and the necessity to restrict the source
> documentation to a "one word, one meaning" scheme.
...
> It actually works pretty well for technical
> documentation, where you can use such a scheme.
...
>
> It's a lot of work and a lot of restrictions for the
> documentation writers. When you're paying them, you can
> usually ask that kind of thing from them. When they're
> volunteers, that doesn't always work so well.
I'm sure computational linguistics is a very stimulating field
but why would we go with machine translation and submit ourselves
to its strict regime when there are people willing and able to
do translation? (And doing so iteratively, towards perfection.)
Open-source projects such as ours don't exactly abound with easy,
bite-sized tasks which non-programmers can sink their teeth into.
(Legal services, accounting, server administration, etc being
examples of non-developer work that need more experience and
long-term commitment.) Translation -is- such an area where a lot
of people can actually contribute if only we set up some proper
web service for it (revision-aware cross-translation-reference?)
or at the very least provide some decent offline tools.
I personally wouldn't want to be restricted to some simplified
language, and I resent the idea of having a single language -
likely English - as a master language which one has to use for
content creation, and from which all translations are generated.
English often has that role, e.g. in programming, but formalizing
this practice also for natural languages doesn't sit well with me.
The wiki-like web thing for the cyrilic writing community mentioned
by Siarzhuk Zharski sounds interesting to me. Anybody got a link?
If you think machine translation fits the needs of Haiku, you will
likely have to put in much of the work yourself. We have people
wanting to translate, given tools, and we have developers able to
write web services, etc, but we have few actual linguists to
maintain the rule set(?) of a machine translation setup and
define/refine a master language.
/Jonas.
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