So here it goes with an example and an answer to Leonhard. I will
probably answer such questions on my blog since they could come up also
in other groups that are reading these blogs.

Thanks for your time and iterest :-) and yes, questions are welcome - I
am not sure how fast I will be to answer then tough ...

Cheers, Sabine

*****

Like I already said yesterday, I would come back to this argument today.

Apertium is already used in some projects, one of which is the Occitan
Wikipedia. For those who are not familiar with Wikis: there you have the
possibility to compare the not proofread version with the proofread
version and that is something you will see by clicking here.

What you see on the left hand side is the text as it was after the
machine translation and on the right hand side the proofread version of
the text. The changes are highlighted in green on the left and in blue
on the right hand side. There are even some parts of the text that were
not changed at all.

The work on the glossary and the grammar rules (well I am not using the
specific terminology here to make things understandable for all) has
been going on for approximately one year now.

At a certain stage the problems arise from vocabulary that is missing
and not so much from the rules. Of course these translations will
probably never be a 100% perfect, but the quality depends very much on
us and our adding terminology and classifying it.

Comparing the above result to what you would see for Spanish-Catalan,
well the last one having been under development for years is much
better.

You can find further reading about co-operation between Wikipedia and
Apertium on the Apertium Wiki.

Language pairs that are right now available are:

* Spanish<-->Catalan
* Spanish<-->Galician
* Spanish<-->Portuguese (pt and pt_BR)
* Catalan<-->English
* Catalan<-->French
* Catalan<-->Occitan (oc and oc@aran)
* Romanian->Spanish

Many other language pairs are under development. Of course: you may
start on any language combination that is comfortable for you. Please
keep in mind: the more similar two languages are the easier it is to
program the rules, the faster the translation engine will produce good
translations.

If you want to start to work on wordlists, please write me at:
s.cretella (at) voxhumanitatis.org and tell me which language pair you
are interested in. You can also reach me by skype at: sabinecretella

I will upload a wordlist to google docs and give you access. Please let
me know if you have difficulties to work online (that is if you work
with a dial-in connection).

The Apertium Chat is on Freenode.

One more thing I just received criticism since machine translation would
flatten the language: well any translated text, in particular when it
comes to literature translations, is post edited by a second person. The
translation is never published directly since during translation - and
you can be the best translator of the world - there are always some bits
and pieces that sound a little strange or that do not really transport
the scene into the other culture. And please allow me to introduce the
concept of cultural localization here that will be explained in one of
the future posts here and that was coined by Dr. Martin Benjamin who is
part of the advisory board of Vox Humanitatis. The concept of cultural
localization became then immediately part of the scope of the
association.

And since I am adding notes here: please remember that the Fundraiser of
the Wikimedia Foundation is still running and that you can help by
donating and telling others that the fundraiser is on. For more
information and to donate please click here.

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Posted By Sabine Cretella to words &amp; more at 12/07/2007 10:02:00 AM