Multilingual Squeak

Joachim Durchholz joachim.durchholz at munich.netsurf.de
Fri Mar 26 19:11:09 UTC 1999


Ivan Tomek wrote:
> 
> I don't think that the problem is as hard if suboptimal translation is
> acceptable.

The problem is not that the translation is just suboptimal. It's plain
misleading.
If you want an example, let Alta Vista search for a few pages in (say)
Chinese and have it translate them to English. The translations are
everything from incomplete to misleading to incomprehensible.
And let me tell you that the Alta Vista translations are *not* bad; I'd
rate them at average for current automatic translation technology.

> Comments: These are 'natural language' but even rather poor
> translation would be better than none: If the original comment is in
> Chinese or Portuguese, even a very approximate translation to English
> is better (for me) than none.

OK. If you don't understand the comment, just read the code.
However, readers should be aware that translated comments can be *very*
misleading. So translated comments should be marked as such.

> Smalltalk words: There are not that many of these in the library and
> they are context free so they can be translated by look-up from a
> dictionary constructed in cooperation by the user and a language
> dictionary lookup. This would not require a large effort on the user's
> part.

Right, it's a simple lookup. No problem here.
The actual problem is coordinating the creation and maintenance of the
word lists. Don't underestimate the size of this task though; it's the
sort of work that mailing list and archive maintainers face, and it will
never end.

Regards,
Joachim
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