WikiTranslate - Collaborative Language Translation

September 25, 2008 11:11 PM

WikiTranslate - Collaborative Language Translation
Despite years of research into automatic language translation, even world-class software fails to capture the grammatical peculiarities and idioms of human language. While Google Translate and Babelfish can give a rough approximation of a translation, only humans can consistently and accurately translate from one language to another. WikiTranslate allows users to input text to be translated to and from English, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish (with more languages to come). The text is first run through the Google translation algorithm that provides a rough translation. This rough translation is then presented to the WikiTranslate user community to tweak, wiki-style, into a complete and correct translation of the original text.
posted by mamessner (2 comments total)

This is exactly what I've been wanting for a long time! You might try hyping it to open-source communities, who often have to translate apps into myriad languages. (They're far from the only ones, of course.)

Though if I could, two suggestions:

- An ability to view things based solely on the destination language. I can help 'clean up' English, but don't really care what language it's coming from. (Though obviously that feature helps, if someone speaks both languages.)

- The browse page doesn't show status; an "Articles needing human review" category (or similar) may be helpful.

All-around, though, thank you for implementing this!
posted by fogster at 4:54 PM on October 6, 2008

Lovely.
posted by Skyanth at 4:21 AM on October 10, 2008