Free Wikipedia Translation Tool

So far Wikipedia has been mostly centered on the English language. If you go to the main Wikipedia page you will see that there are 3,463,000 articles written in English, 1,144,000 in German, 1,028,000 in French while there is a huge tail of languages that have less than 100,000 articles.

Today, Microsoft Research center in India and Wikipedia have created a joint project which would help users to create a multilingual content without putting too much of an effort into translation. It was launched on October 18th, 2010.

The new tool was called WikiBhasha where "bhasha" literately means "language" in Hindi and Sanskrit. It provides content generation in more than 30 languages. The initiators hope that this will stimulate utilization and translation of English content to support the development of non-English part of the website.

According to the head researcher, A Kumaran, the team tries to create an intuitive Wikipedia experience that would transfer the focus from originally translated documents to the final content creation. WikiBhasha was also noted as a great improvement in machine translation abilities. In fact this was one of the driving ideas of the project. "It takes about 4 million sentence pairs, matched between two languages, to develop a machine translator robust enough to create effective translations. In many languages, collecting that much data is a nearly insurmountable task."- Microsoft, Oct 18, 2010.

For a continuous development of the tool, Microsoft has enabled a memorizing function. In other words, every grammatical correction by users within the machine translation would be included into the program's operational data base. This would help the following users to avoid the same mistakes and inappropriate translations. In Kumaran's opinion the launch of such a tool will even support the industry of professional translation services. This kind of joined community participation is very likely to create many more translators and moreover motivate people's interest in rare languages.

Aside from its original purpose WikiBhasha will serve as a localization research base. Creators intend to gather the information about language use in different parts of the world. "This is a fantastic opportunity to do real-world research on what works and what doesn't work with crowds." - Microsoft. In the meantime Mr Kumaran and his team are happy to observe the results of their work.