Under a new project, more Wikipedia articles will be made available in languages as diverse as Gujarati and Swahili.
Wikipedia offers free information to Internet users all over the world. But for the moment, according to Wikipedia’s statistics, only 10 languages boast over 500,000 articles: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, and Russian.
Although the list includes one Asian language and South America’s major tongues, it is clear that large parts of the world do not have significant access to Wikipedia’s content. Google is thus is working on a “Translating Wikipedia” project in order to make Wikipedia’s content more available to major languages such as Arabic and Hindi, as well as lesser-used languages.
The project started in 2008 with an effort to produce more content in Hindi. Google announced on July 14th that it is extending this effort to Arabic, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Swahili, Tamil and Telugu. In order to produce translated articles, Google is relying on a combination of volunteers, translators and Wikipedia contributors. So translating Wikipedia, much as creating original Wikipedia articles, is largely a crowd-sourcing effort.
Google’s Translator Toolkit also plays a big role in the translations, since machine translation — even self-evolving systems such as the Toolkit — is still an imprecise science.
At E-ging, we recognize the importance of language technology and use it to streamline our language translation process. But we also call on top-quality human translators to assure a perfectly understandable and appropriate result — every time. “Let us show you how good translation should be.”
