[Wikipedia-l] Re: Africa info

Wed Feb 23 21:45:29 UTC 2005

Yes, 7.9m people is so small... Wait Tomer, isn't your native language
Hebrew? Remind me how many people speak Hebrew? Or do Xhosa speakers
count for less because they're Africans?

Mark

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 17:20:32 +0000, Tomer Chachamu <the.r3m0t at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 18:32:59 +0200, Andy Rabagliati <andyr at wizzy.com> wrote:
> > If we plug away at the en: wikipedia, adding African-related articles,
> > maybe a couple of years down the line we will be able to automatically
> > translate to Xhosa. I think that is a /much/ better use of everyone's
> > time than writing a Xhosa wikipedia.
> 
> I think not. As your KDE example showed, translation is far more
> complicated than simple dictionary lookups. Xhosa is only spoken by
> 7.9m speakers (mainly in South Africa) and with so few speakers (and
> so little commercial possibility for making a translator) I would
> imagine that Xhosa may never be able to be translated.
> 
> Actually, I just read that it is similar to Zulu, which probably adds
> some more "speakers". Still, I think development of a machine
> translation program is unlikely.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_translation
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language
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