Friday, July 16, 2010

Google working with Wikipedia to translate 'Smaller Languages'

Google July 14 said it is working with Wikipedia contributors, translators and "Wikipedians" (I assume these are users) across India, the Middle East and Africa to translate more than 16 million words for Wikipedia into Arabic, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Swahili, Tamil and Telugu.

While Wikipedia has the so-called common languages English, German and French covered with millions of articles, there is a paucity of pieces translated into the aforementioned smaller languages.

The motive is obvious; Google and Wikipedia have a shared interest in organizing information and content and making it easily consumable for Web users all over the world.

Google has made great progress with Hindi, arguably one of the larger smaller languages, but the method is not so obvious. Google apparently uses Google Trends to pinpoint content and then the Translator Toolkit to translate it for Wikipedia.

Full report here Googlewatch

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