okiwan Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/10/18/wikibhasha/ October 18th, 2010 Folks over at Microsoft Research have been thinking about ways to improve content translation between instances of Wikipedia. For example, today the largest collection of articles is at English Wikipedia (more than 3,000,000). Compare that number with the collection at Hindi Wikipedia (which as of July 31 of this year had 55716). One proven way to increase the articles in Hindi is machine translation, but such translations still need human review and often subtle editing to make them elegantly readable. Enter WikiBhasha, formerly known as WikiBABEL, which launches today as both a MediaWiki extension project and a bookmarklet. WikiBhasha takes content from a targeted Wikipedia page and displays a machine translation to a second language side-by-side. Users can edit, add to or delete the translated content, preview their work and then submit it to the second language Wikipedia. What’s especially interesting to me about this project is the fact that it’s author, researcher A. Kumaran, has tirelessly persuaded Microsoft to allow him to open source the client. The code has been checked into the MediaWiki code tree under the Apache License 2.0, which means that the powerful side-by-side editing tools developed by Mr. Kumaran can potentially be used in other MediaWiki projects. I’m very pleased to see Microsoft take this step, and I hope you will join me in welcoming WikiBhasha. Danese Cooper, Chief Technical Officer This directory contains the Javascript and PHP sources and other resources for 2 the WikiBhasha (Beta) extension that is being open sourced by Microsoft 3 Research. WikiBhasha (Beta) is a being open-sourced as a MediaWiki Extension, 4 with the JavaScript portions under Apache License 2.0 and the PHP portions under 5 GNU GPL License 2.0. We plan to work with the community to go through the 6 review process to make this available as an extension. 7 8 WikiBhasha is aimed at enabling user communities in creating multilingual 9 content in Wikipedia. 10 11 -- WikiBhasha team (17 October 2010) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Infiltrator Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 (edited) Would be interesting to see, how this project is gonna work out in the end. There is no way you can translate a text from one language into another language accurately enough. It will still need someone reviewing the articles to ensure there are no grammatical or spelling mistakes. Edited October 20, 2010 by Infiltrator Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VaKo Posted October 19, 2010 Share Posted October 19, 2010 MS do quite a few OS projects these days. They are actually quite a cool company. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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