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

[John Watlington]

The correct place for discussion of power solutions is devel at laptop.org
It is where previous power discussion have taken place, and is read
by the people working in this area.

wad

On May 19, 2008, at 1:26 PM, Chris Leonard wrote:

> 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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