Submissions/Wikipedia as a path to Nepali Translation
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This is a rejected submission for Wikimania 2012. |
- Submission no.
99
- Title of the submission
Wikipedia as a path to Nepali Translation
- Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation)
workshop
- Author of the submission
- E-mail address
- Username
- Country of origin
Nepal
- Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)
Nepali Wikipedia
- Personal homepage or blog
- Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)
- Track
Wikipedia as a path to Nepali Translation.
Several translation services exist for English, French, Japanese, German or Hindi. However not a single exists for several other languages such as Nepali. Nepal has a population of 30 million according to the 2010 data provided by the World Bank.
Most of the people speak Nepali. Even in the worst case if we consider two third of the people to be speaking Nepali in one way or the other, the figure turns out to be 10 million. The population of Netherlands is 16 million. Even if we consider everyone to be speaking Dutch, there would be more people in Nepal. Dutch language can be translated to or from English using Google or bing. Translations services have already been mature in several other languages while in Nepali it is still untouched. However Nepali does not. We are in the era of HD movies and 3D games, motion detection, infrared to several other domains. Scientists have found how animals talk but we haven’t yet processed texts to translate into Nepali. Necessity is the mother of invention. So an idea would be to pick a nearest language as a base and start translating. Luckily Google supports Hindi translation. If we could build a Hindi to Nepali translation, we could easily translate it to the others by combining the rest of already developed technologies.
Benefits:
- The benefits of selecting Hindi to Nepali Translation would be:- There would be less complexities: For example- Conversion from Roman (ABCD) to Devanagari(क,ख) is mostly done while translating from English to Hindi. Hindi and Nepali share the same script Devanagari. Nepali uses a subset of Devanagari(most of the part which originated from Sanskrit) excluding some of the characters in Hindi which were mostly originated from Urdu.
- Sentence structure (SOV) is the same in Hindi and Nepali while in English it is (SVO). Thus in this case once the subject, verb and the object are handled properly, let’s say from English to Hindi, there would be no or less processing in the remaining part in Nepali. One of the complicated parts is the subject verb object agreement.
- Hindi and Nepali share most root words which came from Sanskrit. Both being geographically together, they share a lot of common words including regional, religious, geographic words. So these words don’t need to be translated and make translation easier.
These points make a good subject that we have a Hindi to Nepali translation software.
Wikipedia on the other hand has a very rich resource of translated articles. Laws of physics are mostly unchangeable. They get updated very rarely but get translated very often to other languages. [:en:Apple] and [:ne:Apple] are some kind of tags which refer that the article of Apple exist in English and in Nepali. So there are chances that both of them might have a same picture or a paragraph about apple. There are more chances that some of the portions of both the articles have the same meaning. Sometimes we can also refer them as translation. Here we can prepare a corpus, and use the similarities to extract data and then process the text to prepare a translation service such as Nepali Translation service which in turn will help translate or proofread other articles. We can use this resultant translation service for various other useful stuffs such as letting a layman in Nepal who can read Nepali but English.
Nepali Wikipedia translator or Hindi to Nepali translation project is one of such project which was inspired by Wikipedia, developed to help edit Wikipedia in Nepali. It is a voluntary work done in the past two years to help the editors in Nepali with their editing.
- Length of presentation/talk
- 25 Minutes
10-15 minutes.
- Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?
Yes
- Slides or further information (optional)
- Special request as to time of presentations
Nothing.
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- Amir E. Aharoni (talk)
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