I have been pondering this for a while and thought I might as well throw it in a blog entry…<\/p>\n
Wikipedia is, of course, a massive collection of mostly-correct information. The information there isn’t fundamentally designed to be machine readable (unlike the semantic web<\/a> stuff), but there are some structures that allow data to be extracted automatically. My favourite example is the {{coord<\/a>}} template allowing the Wikipedia layer in Google Earth.<\/p>\n The part of Wikipedia pages that recently caught my eye is the “other languages” section on the left of every page. I’d be willing to bet that these interwiki links form the largest translation database that exists anywhere.<\/p>\n Take the entry for “Lithography<\/a>” entry as a moderately-obscure example. On the left of that page, we can read off that the German word for lithography is “Lithografie<\/i>”, the Urdu word is “\u00d8\u00b3\u00d9\u2020\u00da\u00af\u00db\u0152 \u00d8\u00b7\u00d8\u00a8\u00d8\u00a7\u00d8\u00b9\u00d8\u00aa<\/i>”, and 34 others. Sure, some of the words might literally be “lithograph” or “photolithography”, but that’s not the worst thing ever. All of this can be mechanically discovered by parsing the wikitext.<\/p>\n Should it not be possible to do some good machine translation<\/a> starting with that huge dictionary? Admittedly, I know approximately nothing about machine translation. I know there are still gobs of problems when it comes to grammar and ambiguity, but a good dictionary of word and phrase translations has to count for something. The “disambiguation” pages could probably help with the ambiguity problem too.<\/p>\n I’d guess that even this would produce a readable translation: (1) chunk source text into the longest possible page titles (e.g. look at “spontaneous combustion<\/a>”, not “spontaneous” and “combustion” separately), (2) apply whatever grammar-translation rules you have lying around, (3) literally translate each chunk with the Wikipedia “other language” article titles, and (4) if there’s no “other language” title, fall back to any other algorithm.<\/p>\n