
Welsh Wikipedia gives me hope - lelf
https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/welsh-wikipedia-google-translate.html
======
Zanni
Oh, for fuck's sake. Alexa not speaking Welsh is hardly a "horror story."
Alexa doesn't speak your language? Don't buy it. It's not "[telling] you which
language your family can speak at home," it's offering a service to the
fattest part of the market first.

The revival of Welsh (and Welsh Wikipedia) is a wonderful thing, but the
framing of the article is awful.

For what it's worth, I live in Hawaii, where the native language and culture
(and government) were also brutally suppressed. Currently there are less than
10,000 native speakers of the Hawaiian language. There's been an uptick with
the recent creation of Hawaiian-language immersion schools, though. You know
what Wikipedia doesn't have? A Hawaiian version, even though it's named for a
Hawaiian (wiki) word.

~~~
bawolff
Wikipedia does have that
[https://haw.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ka_papa_kinohi](https://haw.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ka_papa_kinohi)

~~~
GuB-42
And Google translate properly detects and translates the language too.

Well despite the first sentence "He puke documents and Wikipedia", the
translation seems consistent.

~~~
Zanni
Interesting. The first sentence seems to translate correctly for me:
"Wikipedia is an independent research journal."

------
Igelau
Scots Wikipedia is the best Wikipedia.

[https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yird](https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yird)

~~~
linux2647
Is this what it’s like to read Dutch as someone who speaks German? Or Flemish
as someone who speaks Dutch?

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Myrmornis
Bear with me -- I often wonder whether, for subjects which transcend cultural
differences, Wikipedia should only allow non-English pages where English-
native pages do not exist. My reason is that I suspect that the English-native
versions of pages will tend to be the highest quality due to editor
volume/attention, etc, and I do not want non-English speaking communities to
be disadvantaged by lower quality Wikipedia content. So, the suggestion would
be intense focus on automatic translation of English pages, rather than
creation of parallel pages in n languages.

~~~
gattilorenz
Wait, how's this helpful?

People who use localized Wikipedia are, in my experience, either a) looking
for something not present in en.wiki or b) not proficient in English.

I don't see how it would help, if this is the case. Plus, also in the English
Wikipedia, is not that pages are born complete. It's a refinement process. If
you remove the stubs, wouldn't it become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

~~~
Myrmornis
> a) looking for something not present in en.wiki

That's what I was getting at with "for subjects which transcend cultural
differences". It's hard to name something which transcends cultural
differences and doesn't have an English-language wikipedia page.

> b) not proficient in English.

Yes, my suggestion was that Wikipedia should focus on excellent translations
of content that is originally generated in English. Perhaps the software would
highlight passages needing translation help from the non-English-language
editors would who today be working on parallel/redundant pages in non-English
languages. ("the suggestion would be intense focus on automatic translation of
English pages, rather than creation of parallel pages in n languages.")

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inflatableDodo
In one of Grace Hopper's lectures she mentions that she intially made a
multilingual programming language, but this upset the people she showed it to,
as it would make it easier to use for people who didn't speak English, so that
feature was removed.

I have thought ever since, that this descision is something that has
fundamentally affected the culture of software development in a number of
profoundly negative ways.

~~~
emmelaich
Hmm, that sounds like one of those anecdotes that is retold for more drama
than fact. So I looked it up.

I found this which merely sounds like a managers sensible YAGNI decision.

> Management was concerned that Hopper’s plans were too ambitious, and that
> the Automatic Programming Department was wasting time and energy exploring
> such marginal areas as multilingual programming. “It was completely self-
> evident [to management] that an American computer built in blue-belt
> Pennsylvania couldn’t possibly be programmed in French or German,” she
> recalled. Hopper had to assure her superiors that the proposed business
> language would only be in English.

[https://epdf.pub/grace-hopper-and-the-invention-of-the-
infor...](https://epdf.pub/grace-hopper-and-the-invention-of-the-information-
age-lemelson-center-studies-in.html)

~~~
inflatableDodo
>Management was concerned that Hopper’s plans were too ambitious, and that the
Automatic Programming Department was wasting time and energy exploring such
marginal areas as multilingual programming.

This is not at all the impression given by Grace. Also, I'll note this
explanation makes no logical sense given that it was the first demo to
management of something that management had already told Grace she wouldn't be
able to do at all. If they were concerned at the waste of time and energy,
they would presumably have stopped her when they believed that what she was
working on was never going to work, rather than requesting the removal of a
feature that had been implemented in the first demo.

Here is Grace's take on it, from her MIT lecture -

 _' We'd like to run this German program for you...' Have you figured out what
happened to us? That thing hit the fan. It was absolutely obvious, that a
respectable American computer, built in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, could not
understand French or German. And I had to spend the next four months saying
no, no, no, no, no, no! We wouldn't think of programming it in anything but
English._

She starts the topic at around 59 minutes -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR0ujwlvbkQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR0ujwlvbkQ)

edit - I just checked the dates. Never mind logical sense, the explanation
fails chronological sense. Her demo was in 1952 and she became the very first
director of Eckert–Mauchly's newly formed Department of Automatic Programming,
sometime in 1954. They definitely were not worried about time and energy being
wasted in a department that wouldn't even exist for another two years.

