Translating Wikipedia into 300 languages

A Wikipedia that is equally useful regardless of the lang uage you use for your search, this is the vision of the Abstract Wikipedia project. To realise this ambitious goal, the ency clopaedia is benefiting from a very powerful tool: The Gram matical Framework, developed by Aarne Ranta, Professor of Computer Science, and his colleagues.

Aarne Ranta har Grammatical Framework (GF) since 1998 and he has lofty ambitions: to forma lise the grammatical structure of all the world’s languages and thus make it possible to translate from and into any language you choose.

He demonstrates on the computer screen how it can be done.

– Say that I want to write the sentence, “My house is red”: As soon as I have written “My” a number of neuter nouns are suggested for continuing the senten ce. When I add the word “house” new suggestions appear of appropriate verbs. The system is limited by the fact that I can only use words and grammatical constructions the GF recognises, so I can not come up with just anything. But the advantage is that my sentence is imme diately translated into all fifty languages that are part of the system. And with the help of students and post-grads the GF is continuously being developed, covering to many, if not all, of the world’s languages, is well-suited to Wikipedia’s goal of being a global encyclopaedia for all people everywhere. This is the reason why Aarne Ranta and his research team have been offered cooperation with the Wikimedia Foundation and cooperation around Abstract Wikipedia, says Krasimir Angelov, Associate Professor of Computer Science, who is

– The idea of using the GF to write articles based on facts from the Wikidata. Thus it is about articles with a content that can be translated using the vocabulary and grammatical structure that the GF can handle. We will shortly be launching a demo where 24 languages are included: so the user can write a text in any of these languages and automatically get a translation into all of the other ones. If any facts need correcting, it is sufficient to correct one language in order for it to the software should be easy to use; most people working with Wikipedia are not programmers, but enthusiasts that want to share their expertise within a certain field. And just like Wikipedia itself, Abstract Wikipedia is continuously being developed, says

– There are hundreds of Wikipedians around the world, all contributing to the project’s progress.

Currently, Wikipedia has articles in over 300 languages. But many of these have perhaps only a small number of articles or brief summaries. The lack of content is more prevalent among smaller languages, but even fairly major languages may be poorly represented in the massive encyclopaedia, Aarne Ranta points out.

– Abstract Wikipedia means that articles in English, say, will be translated into Swahili, which of course is valuable.

But the opposite is also important; if an art lover in Uganda writes a text about an exhibition in Kampala, that text will immediately be available in all the other languages included in the GF. This way, culture and knowledge from various countries are disseminated to all. Therefore, our goal is to be able to translate from and into all 300 Wikipedia languages; it is a project which, like Wikipedia itself, will never end.

Abstract Wikipedia is a project initiated by the Wikimedia Foundation, and which aims to create a language-independent version of Wikipedia, meaning that the content of Wikipedia will be available in around 300 languages. To achieve this, they are partnering with the Grammatical Framework, a translation programme developed by Aarne Ranta and his colleagues.

You can find out more at: https://www. grammaticalframework.org/