[Its.an.education.project] Energy alternatives (topic morphing to language barrier lowering)

[Chris Leonard]

On the theory that it would be a shame for possibly useful ideas to be lost
to the list archives, I've created an OLPC Peru / Electricity subpage (
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Peru/Electricidad ) and put some links I
think might be worth further follow up, I think there some good stuff on
microhydro as well as general Peruvian electricity sector links.  I invite
anyone else to add to that page.

I'm not particularly bilingual in Spanish, and the OLPC Peru content is
primarily in Spanish but I have been experimenting with Google translation
to try to lower some of the language barriers on the wiki, including
developing a series of wiki templates in the form of Template:GoogleTrans-xx
that go from lang-xx to any of 22 other langs (current Google coverage).

I've applied this template to the sub-page that I created in Spanish
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Template:GoogleTrans-es

I created the page in Spanish in order to keep the lang-es theme on the OLPC
Peru pages.  Not being very bilingual, I I wrote up my text off-line and
dropped it into this link for automated translation from English to Spanish
before wikification and posting.
http://translate.google.com/translate_t?sl=en&tl=es

Admittedly the grammar is probably a little iffy, but the essence of the
meaning comes across.  Please go to the page and click "English" in the
GoogleTrans-es bar at the top to see for yourself.

Overall, the effort to do this wasn't too great and I'd rather sound stupid
trying to communicate in Spanish than arrogant for only communicating in
English to the OLPC Peru community.  Hopefully a better Spanish speaker than
myself will clean it up on the wiki and improves Google's syntax.

While I do believe in the importance of human translation for technically
detailed information, (e.g. I think that Pootle is best for code), let's be
clear, not many wiki pages get translated and those few pages that are
translated aren't keeping pace with the edits in the original language
page.  Much of what is on the wiki isn't necessarily worthy of taking up a
lot of someone's time to translate (I'd rather see them contributing to
Pootle), and so I think machine translation has it's place as well, as a
supplement that is good enough, but far from perfect.

If anyone with MediaWiki bot-building skills (bot-herder) would like to
collaborate, I have the start of an algorithm in mind to design a bot that
would crawl the OLPCwiki and add the appropriate Template:GoogleTrans-xx
template to pages, I currently have lang-en, lang-es and lang-fr versions
and a spreadsheet for rapidly generating the rest: Bulgarian, Chinese-CN,
Chinese-TW , Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, German, Greek, Hindi,
Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian,
Swedish.

I think there is a similar hack that can be done for lists.  Not necessarily
the outgoing messages, but very possibly on the archives.  A message in the
archive is jsut a URL, feed any URL with a few params (start-lang,
target-lang) to Google, and you've got a machine translation (for any of
over 20 language pairs).  Google has really stepped up it's translation game
recently.
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-translate-becomes-best-online.html

Regards,

cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com
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