Bill Clark wrote:
NOTE: I am replying to an older article because it was
the most recent
thread I could find in my archives on the topic. I think Jimmy's comments
accurately reflect those of most people's (justified) low opinion of raw
(unaided) machine translation output.
On 8/9/04, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote:
First, it is important to understand that for the
most part, the
individual
wikipedia languages are not mere translations.
Perhaps they should be, or more precisely, perhaps there should be a way to
get the English article translated into Urdu, as well as an Urdu version of
the article (with different, Urdu-centric content, as we have now). I'd be
interested in knowing how the French article on Sartre differed from the
English one (for example) but I don't read French.
What is notable is the the Sartre and other articles in French and
English are independently written rather than one being the translation
of the other. At first glance the Spanish version appears to be a
translation from English, and It is conceivable that one or more of the
37 other current versions of the Sartre article are translations, but
I'm not in a position to verify that because of my limited knowledge of
these languages. The Urdu version has not yet been written.
Looking at the brief introductory paragraph, and the first biography
paragraph we have in English
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (1905
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905>-06-21
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_21> – 1980
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980>-04-15
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_15>) was a French
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France> existentialist
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism> philosopher
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher>, dramatist
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playwright>, novelist
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelist> and critic
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_criticism>.
Early life and thought
Sartre was born in Paris <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris> to
parents Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_officer> of the French Navy
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Navy>, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer,
cousin of Albert Schweitzer
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Schweitzer>. When he was 15
months old, his father died of a fever
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fever> and Anne-Marie raised him with
help from her father, Charles Schweitzer, who taught Sartre
mathematics <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics> and introduced
him to classical literature <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classics> at
an early age.
In French we have
Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris
<http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris> 21 juin
<http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_juin> 1905
<http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905> - Paris 15 avril
<http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_avril> 1980
<http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980>) est un philosophe
<http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophe> et écrivain français
<http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89crivains_Fran%C3%A7ais_Par_Ordre_Alphab%C3%A9tique>.
[
Biographie
Né à Paris <http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris> le 21 juin
<http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_juin> 1905
<http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905>, Sartre est orphelin de père à
deux ans et grandit à Paris <http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris>, dans
un milieu bourgeois et intellectuel. Il fait ses études secondaires au
lycée Henri IV <http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyc%C3%A9e_Henri_IV>, où
il fait la connaissance de Paul Nizan
<http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Nizan>.
which translates as
Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris, June 21, 1905 - Paris, April 15, 1980) is a
French philosopher and writer
Biography
Born in Paris on June 21, 1905, Sartre was paternally orphaned at
two years old and grew up in Paris, in a bourgeois and intellectual
environment. His secondary studies were done at the Lycée Henri IV,
where he became acquainted with Paul Nizan
It is interesting to note that reference to the Schweitzer family
appears nowhere in the French article, and Paul Nizan appears nowhere in
the English article!
Second, machine
language translation is typically quite poor.
There are ways to get much, much better machine translation with a little
extra effort from native speakers of the source language. If the words in an
article are part-of-speech (POS) tagged (noun, verb, adjective, preposition,
etc.) then the quality of machine translation of that text improves
dramatically.
I agree that there are ways to improve machine translations, but it
strikes me as impossible for machines to reconcile the cultural gaps
which may exist between language versions. That requires the
intervention of thinking humans.
Ec