WikiTrans

Welcome to WikiTrans, where we provide machine-translated versions of Wikipedia articles, completely linked and searchable in the target language, as well as cross language simultaneous Wikipedia searches.

Esperanto Wikitrans — the English Wikipedia in Esperanto (~ 3 million articles)

Danish Wikitrans — the Swedish Wikipedia in Danish

WikiCross — Consult Wikipedia in several languages simultaneously (first paragraphs)

The WikiTrans project is an ongoing research and development project carried out by the Danish language technology company GrammarSoft ApS, in cooperation with the University of Southern Denmark. The primary goal of the project is to provide cross-language access between individual-language Wikipedias.

First of all, the idea is to make the largest Wikipedia of all - the English one, with over 3 million articles - available in Esperanto and Danish translations. Though both these languages are among the bigger Wikipedias, their ~ 130.000 articles each amount to only a fraction of what is available for English. In addition, the individual articles are often considerably smaller than their English counterparts, less thoroughly researched or simply so-called stubs.

WikiTrans translations are high-quality machine translations, using a rule-based system, GramTrans, that combines deep linguistic analysis (Constraint Grammar) with context-based transfer rules. Both the continued development of the MT system and the fact that Wikiedia articles are constantly being updated, call for a framework with regular updates. Thus, new articles are integrated as they appear for English, and older translations are repeated at intervals of a few months.

Given the fact that even many original Wikipedia articles in smaller languages are partially translated from or at least inspired by existing articles in a larger language, automatic translation should help to facilitate the work of Wikipedia authors interested in closing the English-Esperanto and English-Danish article gap.

At its site (e.g. epo.wikitrans.net for Esperanto), the translated material can be searched for both original and translated encyclopedia entries in parallel. In addition, the Lucene-based search engine will find - and order - full text hits, illustrated with snippets. Disambiguation for multiple entries is achieved as a side-effect of this, nor is it necessary to maintain referring pages for secondary or synonymous encyclopedia entries, most of which will easily be found and redirected by the site's search engine.

The first phase of the WikiTrans project targeted the Esperanto-translation of the 100.000 English articles with the highest page usage counts, and concluded its first translation run on March 15th, 2010. In a second round, the 500.000 largest articles and all common noun articles were translated, and the complete 3 million target was achieved in December 2010. Activities in 2011 include work on the upcoming English-Danish WikiTrans module, as well as regular retranslation and updates for the English-Esperanto language pair.

Without revision or rewriting, WikiTrans articles are of course simply translations, and though they are not quotations in the literal sense of the word, they do have the same content and authorship history as in the original Wikipedia article. Therefore, for better or worse, a WikiTrans article retains the same strengths and weaknesses, qualities and errors as the original. It should also be pointed out that the process of translation itself may have introduced a certain number of inconsistencies, ambiguities or even errors. While such cases are rare and usually contextually clear to a human reader, you will always find a link to the original article for reference.