[WikiEN-l] Re: [Intlwiki-l] wikipedia in Arabiya

Mon Jul 14 00:42:07 UTC 2003

> almisrah.com is down. I can't confirm anything.

Whoops!  I meant
http://www.almisbar.com/salam_trans.html

> I hear ajeeb.com does good in translation.

Ajeeb requires a paid membership -- its out of
consideration for public use...

> Machine translation is far from a solution for
> Arabic. Especially when it
> comes to a publicly written encyclopedia.

I disagree with this -- if its making a blanket -case
statement.  Machine tools are merely for assistance. 
They cannot hope to replace the keen eye -- in any
language, regardless of proficiency.  There are known
and published people on the WP -- ask any of them if
they have ever written anything worth reading that
didnt need at least a proofread or two.  Same
principle -- in fact, our usernames register our
authorship for Wiki articles (If they are substantive
enough -- if they dont get pruned, chopped, etc..) So
we treat each article like a series of copyedits --
why not apply this to translation? 

> RNA, for example, was translated literally into its
> Arabic meaning, which
> then read: "rana".

> Arabic, BTW, doesn't use voels (sp?). My name is
> Ahmad. In Arabic the
> letters used are: ahmd. It is up to the reader to
> spell the word correctly.
> This is one reason why it is hard to do machine
> Arabic translation even
> theoretically.

Ahmad = AeLF, kHAe, MIM, DAeL ?

So your saying that machine translation doesnt take
into account the alphabet-abjad gap? 
Thats amazing. With almisbar theres an option for
using Haraka -- though these might seem like training
wheels for the native speaker.  Would a rule to use
Haraka , when machine translated from the english work
-- wouldnt that add too  many oddities into the text
that would have to be sorted out later?

I can see how it could try to over-phoneticize words
it doesnt understand.. but anyway.. It bears some
further investigation. Not all are equal -- and it may
just be necessary to buy something -- though it would
be a limited kind of thing... 

There should be a reasonable thresh-hold -- I dont
like to hear the typical criticism by native speakers
of non-native speakers and their poor language skills
-- as long as theres something on the page -- A title
and seven words -- this can be enough to seed the
interest of someone willing to expand on that.   What
I want to know is how much is too much --  is there
such a thing when anyone can edit/mach-translate a
page?

-S-

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