Machine translation in its current status is so useless for anything beyond ordering Opera Garnier tickets, that the copyright status of its output is not quite relevant and i don't expect this to change in the next fifty years.

On what basis do you make this extremely negative assessment? Readability is the the same thing as ability to read.

Honestly, I should have learned by now to ignore comments like this. Google is the leading world expert on machine translation and they think it's a good idea. I understand why they think it's a good idea, you don't. You're shooting straight from the gut. On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 3:13 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote: _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 00:26, Brian<Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu> wrote: Google You're Not quite - i am finishing a degree in Linguistics and i work as an NLP programmer, so i know the field a little. Google is the leading world expert in searching vast amounts of text in English, a language with next to no morphology. They aren't as good at searching in Hebrew, Spanish and Russian. And their translation software doesn't even cover Persian, a language with a relatively simple morphology. Google appear to assume that the statistical approach to machine translation is the only one that matters and that their leadership in search technologies makes them the leaders in machine translation. They are wrong. The statistical approach helps, but humans don't think only statistically. The grammars of even the best-researched languages - English, French, German - are ridiculously far from being described completely. When i say "grammar", i refer to the whole language system: morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse analysis, typography, prosody, phonology and more. We can't teach computers grammar, because we don't really understand it ourselves, and without teaching computers proper grammar, the statistical approach is very limited. Google improved their translation software a little in the last couple of years but they are many, many years away from being able to translate a real text. Google translation paired with something like [[Universal Networking Language]] or maybe OmegaWiki may yield better results, but it will take many more years to complete. Of course, something may change and Big Companies may start pouring a lot of money into dictionary and grammar book writers. Until that happens, expect improvements in machine translation to be Very Slow. -- אמיר אלישע אהרוני Amir Elisha Aharoni http://aharoni.wordpress.com "We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Brian wrote: It would be nice if such a corpus (or rather, the resulting dictionary of translated words, phrases and sentences) could also be "open content". Are you in talks with Google about this, Brian? Would they be interested in providing open content output in exchange for open content input? -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Machine translations are not new work, neither derivatives, as it is done by machines and not by humans. Also Google will have a hard time claiming that because some unidentified person added text or an url to a open service they now has the right to do whatever they want with the text. I guess what they try to say in the TOS is that the text will be used to build the statistical engine and you give Google the right to do so. That is, they provide the translation and you provide the corrections which is then released to them. John _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Google previously used Systrans engine, but now uses their own. Sort of, there are some rumors about them using a open source statistical translation engine. http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/10/google-translate-switches-to-googl…

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From: Allen Gunn <gunner(a)aspirationtech.org> To: "icommons(a)lists.ibiblio.org" <icommons(a)lists.ibiblio.org> X-Enigmail-Version: 0.95.7 Subject: [Icommons] Open Translation Tools 2009 - Call for Participants

Howdy iCommons friends, If you are involved with the open source tools and distributed processes behind the translation of open content, we'd love you to consider joining us in Amsterdam in late June for Open Translation Tools 2009. And please help us spread the word to those who might be interested - blog it, post it to other lists, tweet it, Facebook it. We thank you for your help in bringing together people passionate about the translation of open knowledge. And a shout-out to Ahrash Bissell, who has been wonderfully supportive in helping us shape the vision for the event. Full event blurbage is pasted below, and also available at http://www.aspirationtech.org/events/opentranslation/2009 We hope to see you in Amsterdam at the end of June! thanks & peace, gunner ----- Open Translation Tools 2009 - Call for Participants! http://www.aspirationtech.org/events/opentranslation/2009 Aspiration is delighted to announce Open Translation Tools 2009 (OTT09), to be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, from 22-24 June, 2009. The event will be followed by an Open Translation "Book Sprint" which will produce a first-of-its-kind volume on tools and best practices in the field of Open Translation. Both events are being co-organized in partnership with FLOSSManuals.net and Translate.org.za, and generously supported by the Open Society Institute. Agenda partners for the event include Creative Commons, Global Voices Online, WorldWide Lexicon, Meedan, and DotSUB. OTT09 will build upon the work and collaboration from Open Translation Tools 2007 (http://www.aspirationtech.org/events/opentranslation). The event will convene stakeholders in the field of open content translation to assess the state of software tools that support translation of content that is licensed under free or open content licenses such as Creative Commons or Free Document License. The event will serve to map out what's available, what's missing, who's doing what, and to recommend strategic next steps to address those needs, with a particular focus on delivering value to open education, open knowledge, and human rights blogging communities. Primary focus will be placed on supporting and enabling distributed human translation of content, but the role of machine translation will also be considered. "Open content" will encompass a range of resource types, from educational materials to books to manuals to documents to blog content to video and multimedia. We invite all prospective participants to answer the Open Translation 2009 Call for Participants. The agenda goals of the 2009 event will be several: * Addressing the Translation Challenges Faced by the Open Education, Open Content, and human rights blogging communities, and mapping requirements to available open solutions. * Building on the vision and exploring new use cases for the Global Voices Lingua Translation Exchange * Documenting the state of the art in distributed human translation, and discussing how to further tap the tremendous translation potential of the net * Making tools talk better: realizing a standards-driven approach to open translation * Exploring and sketching out Open Translation API Designs, building on existing work and models * Documenting workflow requirements for missing open translation tools * Match-making between open source tools and open content projects * Mapping of available tools to open translation use cases See the Agenda Overview (http://www.aspirationtech.org/events/opentranslation/2009/agenda/overview) for elaboration and more details about what is being planned. Most importantly, the agenda will center on the needs and knowledge of the participating projects, structuring sessions and collaborations to focus on designing appropriate processes and selecting appropriate tools to support open content projects and inform further development of open source translation tools. In addition, OTT09 will continue the knowledge sharing for the open translation community, and continue discussion on other identified needs from OTT07. The agenda for this event will be greatly informed by open education, open content and human rights blogging projects with specific translation needs, and a number of sessions will be structured to both characterize requirements and propose solutions to respective projects' translation requirements. OTT07 mapped out a hefty list Open Translation Tools (http://www.aspirationtech.org/papers/ott07/tools). Participants at OTT09 will survey what has changed over the past 18 months, and assess the most pressing remaining gaps. If OTT09 sounds like your kind of event, we invite you to answer the Open Translation 2009 Call for Participants! http://www.aspirationtech.org/events/opentranslation/2009 -- Allen Gunn Executive Director, Aspiration +1.415.216.7252 www.aspirationtech.org Aspiration: "Better Tools for a Better World" _______________________________________________ Icommons mailing list Icommons(a)lists.ibiblio.org http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/icommons

2009/6/9 Brian <Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu>du>: to multiple high Under Google's TOS you cannot enter CC or GFDL produced by someone else into the translation tool. -- geni _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 00:54, geni<geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: Where exactly do the TOS say it? I couldn't find it. They would never find out about it anyway. In the current state of things, any machine-translated text has to be edited manually and thus it is not very different from translating a text using a dictionary - and i believe that a human translator doesn't have to pay per-word royalties to the dictionary publisher. An unedited machine-translated text is likely to be speedily deleted as patent nonsense, before copyvio is even considered. -- אמיר אלישע אהרוני Amir Elisha Aharoni http://aharoni.wordpress.com "We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

2009/6/9 Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)gmail.com>om>: "By submitting your content through the Service, you grant Google the permission to use your content permanently to promote, improve or offer the Services" "By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services." You can't grant those rights if the copyright is held by a third party. As a result you can't feed someone elses CC or GFDL content into the system. There are probably other issues but the TOS is unclear. -- geni _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

2009/6/9 Brian <Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu>du>: whereby text I think the odds of you successfully arguing that that does not fall under submitting are pretty much zilch. In any case there are likely other issues but that is just the most straightforward one. -- geni _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 1:14 AM, Brian<Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu> wrote: holds download's a imports the such a text, If I do not see your argument... There is a contract between Google and the user, granting Google certain rights. Why does the fact that the user (and/or Google) intends to use the material for something else void this contract? -- André Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

2009/6/10 Brian <Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu>du>: agreeing Show me exactly where they entered into such an agreement. Sane, non evil TOS service are not Google's strong point. Remember the chrome mess? -- geni _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

2009/6/10 Brian <Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu>du>: So you can't actually back up your assertion. -- geni _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Not only did you not provide a critique of my more general claim (that the user does not enter into a contract with Google regarding Wikipedia's data) but you have no provided any sort of well founded critique of this one. You've basically said, in both cases, "I don't believe that."

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 6:01 PM, Amir E. Aharoni<amir.aharoni(a)gmail.com> wrote: If it is deleted as nonsense,  that will be a gross error by the administrator, at least in enWP.  It is usually possible to roughly understand what is meant in a Google translation. That's enough to defeat speedy deletion. What these texts need is revision. I think of them essentially as an automated dictionary.

current level of sophistication of translation tools, especialy of languages that do not belog to the same group as english, german, french, etc. is completely useless. Machine translations into slavic languages are to be deleted from wiki immediatealy. masti

current level of sophistication of translation tools, especialy of languages that do not belog to the same group as english, german, french, etc. is completely useless.

What I see as a great feature in the toolkit is the translation memory: in practice (after you switch of the machine translation), common phrases in Wikipedia articles - like "external links", "notes", "history", "early life" etc. - are pretranslated once a human has already translated them; if more then one people start working on the same article separately, they can make use of the other users' translations and build upon them (without having to explicitly 'collaborate' or 'share' for this function to work).

Let me agree with it completely (out of the shadow ;). This feature's aim is obviously to help understand totally "alien" texts to a certain [at least minimal?] extent. This whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with 'translation/interpretation' in it's proper sense. It's a pair of crutches for those, who are otherwise helpless. ;)

I would just like to point out that every single critic has ignored the premise that I started this thread with: "This is a great example of machines helping people help machines help people."

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 10:53 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote: > Sure, but even with 90% accuracy (which is still very low) one needs to > remain aware of the limitations of machine translation. Seeing it as a > crutch is a healthy approach. What needs to be discouraged is the > dangerous techno-pop attitude that there is a machine solution for every > situation, and that machines can find the magic substitute for common > sense. > > Ec >

Let me disagree. Hungarian is not in the same group by far, and the results make it possible to understand more than 50% of the text (sometimes I'd say above 90%). While this is far from proper translation it is by no means _useless_, since its obvious use is to understand a completely foreign text to some extents.

Hoi, The quality of the translations will vary. There are many reasons for it and one of the things that will make a difference is the number of people using the translate tool as a rough first pass. Once this is done, using the translation functionality will help Google to improve the quality of the code. This has been said before, there is no news here. What is relevant however is that in order to support the languages that have not been supported so far, there is a need for people actually using this tool to build the translation corpus that gets you this first pass functionality. Translation is not something where a silver bullet will provide an "instant on - high quality" experience and it is the languages that are currently not supported that have the highest need for tools like this.

Hoi, One of the most important things that is needed for adding languages to a technology like this is having a sufficiently sized corpus. For general availability, the expectation for the quality is quite high. To me this seems to be one reason why Google did not add more languages. Another reason why many corpora are not big enough is because of the problem of identifying a text for the language it is written in. When you consider that a few years ago I learned that only a small percentage of Internet content has the metadata for the language that is used.. When you then consider that something like 75% is actually wrong... Given that Google actually supports MediaWiki, it may be that they are willing to support our language. The problem however is that many of our language have illegal and even wrong codes. The consequence is that it is not obvious to just support our "language". This issue will not be resolved because people are under the impression that the "community" has the final word about the names of our languages. This is naive as well as problematic because it prevents the ease of the argument for Google to support our languages.. Thanks, GerardM

One of the most important things that is needed for adding languages to a technology like this is having a sufficiently sized corpus.

Hoi, The proper use of language codes is indeed a recurring theme. Calling it a hobby horse gives the impression that it does not have a real world application. It does have a real world application and one of the problems with language is that it is truly hard to recognise languages confidently. Suggesting that Google can because of its size is too easy. I am sure they would have if they could. Thanks, GerardM

Gerard Meijssen hett schreven: This is interesting. I did not know it's possible to train new languages. Is there any available information on the requirements? What requirements need to be met, to make Google support them (so they can be selected in the drop-down at the translator toolkit)? _How much_ text do they need as a basis to finally enable the translation function? (My personal experience with the collaboratetiveness of Google is a bad one. Although Google is a multi-billion dollar company and [in a fair world] should actually _pay_ people for things like translating their interface in as much languages as possible [as Google with its 80% search engine market share is one of the most important internet access vectors and not having a search engine in your language is a big accessibility barrier] they rather choose to go the cheap way and let volunteers translate it. That not enough, they have the chutzpa to _reject_ adding any further languages [no additions since at least 2007, although they still support Elmer Fudd, bork bork bork, Klingon and pirate speak...]. At the moment Google supports the languages of roundabout 85 to 90% of the world's population and it seems, they don't care about the rest.) Marcus Buck _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

IMHO automatic translations into Polish are useless, as they only allow rough orientation in the contents of an article. It concerns not only

2009/6/21 Nikola Smolenski <smolensk(a)eunet.yu>yu>: It's not useless, but it's not all that useful. I find when translating from other Wikipedias to add to the English version of an article that it's the subtle and important details that get mashed to uncertainty. - d. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Kalan wrote: The funniest example I noticed is that "flew" was translated to Serbian as "MaudDib" :) (this has been corrected since). And yet I can not stress enough how much I find this service useful, both for personal use and to ease translation. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Of course these are now things that you are able to fix and which can be shared with everyone.

"Ljubljana" was translated to English in earlier phases of the software as "rape"... In Italian to English, "L'Italia" became

Sometimes cities are "translated" - "Koper" was translated to English from Slovene as "Chicago" and "Kranj" as "Miami"... of course Kranj is 100km inland and Miami is largely beachfront and the opposite with Chicago and Koper. "Ljubljana" was translated to English in earlier phases of the software as "rape"... In Italian to English, "L'Italia" became "Canada"; in Tagalog to English, "Pilipinas" became "Japan" - when they first debuted the Tagalog language capability, I tested it with the tl.wp article on Manila which informed me that Manila is the capital of Japan... Mark