Topic on Talk:Content translation

Hi! I report a major problem with the Ligurian language wikipedia (and I think it may be common to other wikis aswell) that makes machine translation useless and with little possibility of improvement. On lij.wiki we want to reflect the great variability of our language and currently have pages in 19 macro-varieties of it (plus a number of sub-varieties) and, since Ligurian does not have a common writing standard, there are pages in at least 25 different ways of writing it. This, in addition to the very poor quality of the translated text, makes it completely useless because the AI produces a weird mixture of all the varieties and different spellings, it takes way longer to correct the machine translated text than to write it manually.

If it is possible to have a translator differentiated by variety/orthography, perhaps it could be of some use (I don't think so anyway), but as things stand, for an endangered language such as ours this is particularly harmful, with the serious risk that it will be used to translate texts in Ligurian being the only form of automatic translation available online (and with the results that can be seen).

For these reasons, considering also that lij.wiki and lij.wikisource are the largest collections of Ligurian language texts available online (and therefore I sense that they are widely used by the IA itself to produce texts), I strongly believe that it is much better to deactivate this function in our wiki, best regards.

Hi,

Thanks for the question.

Were any articles published with bad translation?

@Amire80 Hi and thanks for your quick answer. I noticed these problems testing the new feature after our wikipedia has been informed of it, I have not published any translation for the above reasons.

If you are interested in a specific example of this wrong logic, the AI uses the preterite, which has not been used in the Ligurian language for at least a century, probably because of the older texts on our wikisource (written with orthographies from that time, different from those we use!)

(hope I have made myself clear, I'm not so fluent in English)

Thanks for the clarification. I just wanted to make sure if the complaint is just about the output of the machine translation or also about bad published articles.

Can this machine translation output be at least somewhat useful to some people as a first draft of a translation that can be corrected?

Basically, I share the opinion of my colleague admin. However, as we control daily our Ligurian pages and we discourage people who do not speak the language from creating pages by writing randomly, I would leave the system active for some time and see if improvement can be made somehow. In the meantime we'll ask other people of our community.

Thanks for the positivity :)

@Amire80 I personally think not, since it is basically the same as using the translator as before AI considering all the changes you have to make to the text. Anyway, this is just my opinion, so I'll open a local discussion about this topic to get other feedbacks.

The main problem is there are few contributors on lij.wiki, if a user who does not know the language tries to create a page with automatic translation, it is likely that we'll have to delete it, which may lead to some unpleasant dynamics.