Aphaia wrote: > Ah, I omitted T, and I meant Toolkit. A toolkit with garbage could be > called toolkit, but it doesn't change it is useless; it cannot deal > with syntax properly, i.e. conjugation etc. at this moment. Intended > to be "reviewed and corrected by a human" doesn't assure it was really > "reviewed and corrected by a human" to a sufficient extent. It could > be enough for your target language, but not for mine. Thanks. > I think then it's not just about the capabilities of the tool or the qualities of the language, but also the abilities of the human being who is counted on to "intervene" in the translation. As with Wikipedia editing generally, we don't really have a good mechanism to ensure that a given individual has a particular skill level, we rely on their mistakes being corrected by others. The only guarantee that the editor of an article understands its subject matter (or even, in this case, knows the language in which it is written) is for each of us to be aware of our own limitations.
It's quite likely that for some languages, current translation tools are not usable. It's possible that in some cases they never will be usable. Speakers of a given language should evaluate and decide for themselves. But it's certain that some people shouldn't be using these tools, if they're not doing enough to clean up the machine translation word salad. I know that I'd hesitate to use them in languages that I've studied but am not particularly fluent in, like Spanish or Italian (not that those Wikipedias need this kind of contribution from me anyway). If the tools are being used indiscriminately, it might be best to persuade people that they should work in areas they understand, not simply reject the tool outright. --Michael Snow _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
