Talk:Main Page

Localisation
Thoughts on have localisation pages for separate languages(or possible even a whole other wiki(eg. fr.proofwiki.org, en.proofwiki.org, etc.)? --Joe (talk) 19:11, 9 June 2011 (CDT)


 * Are there techniques for generating these things automatically? If not, isn't it more sensible to let an in-line translation tool do it for you when you access the link?
 * We already have at least one page in this wiki in German, from someone who thought that would be a good idea. But I'm daunted by the maintenance aspects of having to do the work in multiple languages - unless, as I say, there's some automatic technique for handling the hard work. --prime mover 00:26, 10 June 2011 (CDT)

Definitely a `curator' would be needed for each language. I think it's omitting large community to exclude other languages -- though perhaps it ought to be restricted to the main languages in which maths is written, say Russian, French, and German, maybe Spanish (don't know what Asian languages are used). Probably most people could write in English, but I could write in French, I very much doubt that I would. --Linus44 08:47, 10 June 2011 (CDT)


 * S'il faut que je le faire ... ah, putain de merde, je ne le veux pas. --prime mover 12:35, 10 June 2011 (CDT)


 * I rather suspect a bot would be pretty terrible at translating stuff (just try asking google translate to switch a page to french/spanish/whatever now and see how readable it is. I tend to think that it would be better to stick to one language, both to avoid creating an insane amount of work to curate/translate/etc and because it would seem to lead to a higher quality/quantity of articles (compare other language wikipedias to the english one, for instance).  Also, looking at the google analytics report for the past month: 12,000 visits from the us, 6000 from the uk, 3000 from india, 2000 each from canada and australia, 1500 from germany, 600 each from the philippines and pakistan, 500 each from south korea and france, etc.  Also 80% of visits were from some flavor of english (no, I have no idea how they track that, but google analytics is awesome). Of course, feel free to disregard all of this, seeing as it comes from an American who speaks only english and rather limited spanish. --Alec  (talk) 02:03, 12 June 2011 (CDT)

Agree that automatic translation is a non-starter; Google translate is next to useless, it just swaps each word in turn for something in the dictionary. Of the more intelligent options, comparing with a catalogue of properly translated phrases seems to be the best, but the biggest database (en français) I can find isn't really up to scratch (I tried "local field" but it just had some stuff about a meadow).

Also FWIW I changed my mind -- I think there's more to be gained by `sister sites' forming independently of proofwiki; any of the results here could be phrased, proved and categorised in ten different ways, and I see no reason to impose the existing structure on a site in another language.

It might be interesting to set up separate wikis as suggested, and demand only that the philosophy be followed. Perhaps a community might grow, and we can share stuff, manually translated as people are able/feel like it.

I would also add that the fact that the site is already written in English somewhat skews the data from Google analytics --Linus44 21:04, 12 June 2011 (CDT)


 * If anyone wants to set up a sister wiki in a foreign language, my voice is: go to it. If we find it's worth linking to, then we can do that. Until then I would suggest that Google Translate is perfectly adequate. If you can't understand the gist of what's being said then your grasp of your own language is probably a bit shaky. :-) As a basis for one to generate a different-language version of a given page it's a good start, at least for someone appropriately bilingual in those two languages.


 * But as I say: not me, not today. --prime mover 00:32, 13 June 2011 (CDT)


 * Just had another idea: who's up for working on a "mathematical translation dictionary" project which does translate "local fields" into "corps locaux"? Ça plane pour moi ... --prime mover 00:35, 13 June 2011 (CDT)