Wikipedia is a pretty popular encyclopedia site, to say the least. And to make sure its knowledge base is available to everyone around the world, it needs to provide them in other languages besides English. To that end, the Wikimedia Foundation has announced that Google Translate will be available to editors of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia already makes use of a number of other machine translation systems, including the likes of Apertium and Youdao. The addition of Google Translate gives editors of Wikipedia articles an additional 15 languages to work with, bringing the grand total to 121 languages.
To be clear, articles aren’t just translated directly from one language to another. The machine translation – including Google Translate – makes an initial translation of an article. Human editors then review and improve upon that before publishing the translated article.
Before adding Google Translate to the mix, Wikipedia already has nearly 400000 articles translated by its content translation tool. The addition of what it calls “one of the most advanced machine translation systems available today” will likely help increase that number.
