Distributed Translation Project

moon unit beta writes "New Scientist has this story about a new plan to build a multi-language translation database called the World Wide Lexicon, using a distributed community of volunteers. The designer compares it to a distributed computing project and believes it could make it easier to translate more obscure languages."

Comments

very cool.. but only for hobby use

[soap.xml]

[snip]"One of the main problems is quality assurance," says Ramesh Krishnamurthy, a linguistics expert at the University of Wolverhampton, in the UK. "Translation is a highly developed skill." [snip] But Paul Rayson, a research fellow at Lancaster University, adds that unskilled translators may confuse the meaning of individual words. "The problem is you generally need the context to get a good translation," he says.[snip]

This looks like it will be a very cool project, but for corporate/buisiness use I don't think it would ever fly.

If you have ever played in the area of i18n then you will quickly understand why this pbly won't work perfectly. There are so many caveats to each language, tone, context etc... This might be a useful starting point for transaltion services, but for the final cut, it would still need to be checked and double checked by a translation service.

I still think its very cool though ;)

-ryan

Could work, but....

[ThinkingGuy]

One of the big issues with translating between human languages is context. While many words have more or less direct equivilants in other languages ("dog"(en) "perro"(es)), you're always going to run into slang, cultural references, and especially, jargon, where the particular usage will not be in a standard dictionary, and only by the context can the actual meaning be inferred (Example: the word "anchor" in the context of sailing versus the context of webpage design).
Not that this can't be overcome with the distributed model the article discusses, but I still think it will be a while before we see computer translation that doesn't require at least some degree of human assistance.

HOW to GET really BAD translations

[maggard]

First off I'm going to guess that 90% of the folks who will be posting gung-ho comments on this will be unilingual Americans. The folks posting against it will be those who're bilingual and ever read the "same" document in both languages.

It doesn't work. If translating were so simple for machines to do they'd be doing a fine job. However good translation requires context, insight, emotional inflection, etc. Even then each and every one ends up different; sometimes subtly sometimes blatantly.

Just as machine translation sux at these so will distributed translation. Reading a paragraph or a page doesn't tell enough about the feel, flow, or tone of a document. There are numerous words and phrases that can be interpreted multiple ways between any two languages and will be, each time differently by each interpreter.

If you don't know this already then go and look up any document (books and short stories are easy to find, so is poetry) that has been translated more then once. Take a look at the different translations and ask yourself - "Are these really from the same source document?"

Now imagine trying to read something composed of alternating paragraphs or pages from each translation: Incoherence.

Distributed problem solving works for subjects with clearly defined data sets, methodologies, and standards; not human language.