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Distributed Translation Project

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the how-long-before-it-does-klingon dept.

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."

1 of 216 comments (clear)

  1. very cool.. but only for hobby use by soap.xml · · Score: 5, Insightful

    [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