Learning patterns/Developing Apertium MT for your language in Content Translation

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A learning pattern forproject management
Developing Apertium MT for your language in Content Translation
problemCreating a machine translator for your language
solutionMaking an Apertium language pair with the help of the Apertium community
creatorUnhammer
endorse
created on12:23, 16 March 2016 (UTC)
status:DRAFT

What problem does this solve?[edit]

Content Translation is a great tool which is made even better for the language pairs where there is machine translation support – if the languages you translate between are not included, and you're a bit technically minded, you can contribute to create a new Apertium machine translator for your language pair!

Screenshot of Content Translation Bokmål→Nynorsk

What is the solution?[edit]

  1. Read the Contributing guide, and decide how you'd like to contribute
  2. Join the IRC channel and ask about starting a new language pair (or getting a beta pair up to release quality)
  3. Follow the New Language Pair HOWTO under the guidance of a mentor
  4. Talk to other Wikimedia users from the relevant language communities to get more people involved

Things to consider[edit]

  • There are many ways to help getting support for your language pair
    • Simply voicing that you want it might make others motivated to contribute
    • You can help find and document resources (language data like word lists, corpora, dictionaries and grammars, or simply record mistakes in an existing beta translator)
    • And finally, you can edit the Apertium language data itself and ask for SVN commit access to Apertium

The Apertium machine translation platform is especially geared towards getting high-quality translations out of closely-related language pairs, where there may not be enough parallel data available to create high-quality statistical systems. Apertium developers thus tend to get more excited about translation between closely-related (and typically non-English) languages, which is where Apertium really shines.

When to use[edit]

When Content Translation does not support your favoured translation directions, or the current translator there makes too many mistakes.

This pattern was created as part of the IEG project "Pan-Scandinavian Machine-assiste Content Translation".[1]

Endorsements[edit]

See also[edit]

Related patterns[edit]

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