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Another interesting application for wikipedia is translation of technical terms, although one has to be careful with that (I wouldn't trust a automated translat

by atoav 3y ago

Another interesting application for wikipedia is translation of technical terms, although one has to be careful with that (I wouldn't trust a automated translation). Translation services often suck at translating technical terms, but if you find your languages wikipedia page on it and switch the language there is a good chance the title gives you a nice pointer. This doesn't work always, but if you are proficient enough in both languages you won't have a hard time figuring out if it is correct.

Aachen 3y ago
An issue with this is when articles exist in another language, but you can't link it. Nowadays it isn't as easy as just filling in that O is the Dutch article about what is called Eaux in French, you need to visit another Wikimedia project called wikidata and enter a translation there. But if the target name, O, is already in use, you need to first find a new data object name for O and migrate the wikidata object to the new name and then create a new one for the translation of Eaux. Or maybe the problem was that the wikidata ID for the Dutch article was already linked to something else (so O points to wikidata ID 123 and Eaux points to wikidata ID 321). Either way, you need some migration which first orphans one of the two sides iirc. It has been a few years so I forgot the details, but this is where I ran into some wall. I think you need special permissions for it and there's a gigantic backlog of such requests, essentially it never happens and so articles remain untranslated and unlinked. For some languages like German, there's another translation site with human-vetted translations: https://dict.cc https://dict.cc. It has support for language pairs beyond DE<>EN but those are pretty limited and iirc the suggestions queue always full. Not that DE<>EN is flawless but it's good and virtually always more helpful than DeepL or Gtrans

by atoav 3y ago

Aachen 3y ago

An issue with this is when articles exist in another language, but you can't link it. Nowadays it isn't as easy as just filling in that O is the Dutch article about what is called Eaux in French, you need to visit another Wikimedia project called wikidata and enter a translation there. But if the target name, O, is already in use, you need to first find a new data object name for O and migrate the wikidata object to the new name and then create a new one for the translation of Eaux. Or maybe the problem was that the wikidata ID for the Dutch article was already linked to something else (so O points to wikidata ID 123 and Eaux points to wikidata ID 321). Either way, you need some migration which first orphans one of the two sides iirc. It has been a few years so I forgot the details, but this is where I ran into some wall. I think you need special permissions for it and there's a gigantic backlog of such requests, essentially it never happens and so articles remain untranslated and unlinked. For some languages like German, there's another translation site with human-vetted translations: https://dict.cc https://dict.cc. It has support for language pairs beyond DE<>EN but those are pretty limited and iirc the suggestions queue always full. Not that DE<>EN is flawless but it's good and virtually always more helpful than DeepL or Gtrans