Grants talk:IEG/Pan-Scandinavian Machine-assisted Content Translation

9/29/15 Proposal Deadline: Change status to 'proposed edit

Hi Unhammer,

This draft is looking like it's well on its way. I'm writing to remind you to make sure to change the status of your proposal from 'draft' to 'proposed' by the September 29, 2015 deadline in order to submit it for review by the committee in the current round of IEG. If you have any questions or would like to discuss your proposal, let me know. We're hosting a few IEG proposal help sessions this month in Google Hangouts. I'm also happy to set up an individual session. Warm regards, --Marti (WMF) (talk) 20:53, 20 September 2015 (UTC)Reply

Thanks! I'm planning on attending the Hangout tomorrow; and have the deadline in my calendar :-) --Unhammer (talk) 07:30, 21 September 2015 (UTC)Reply

Eligibility confirmed, round 2 2015 edit

 

This Individual Engagement Grant proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for round 2 2015 review. Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during this community comments period.

The committee's formal review for round 2 2015 begins on 20 October 2015, and grants will be announced in December. See the schedule for more details.

Questions? Contact us.

Marti (WMF) (talk) 02:40, 30 September 2015 (UTC)Reply


Aggregated feedback from the committee for Pan-Scandinavian Machine-assisted Content Translation edit

Scoring criteria (see the rubric for background) Score
1=weak alignment 10=strong alignment
(A) Impact potential
  • Does it fit with Wikimedia's strategic priorities?
  • Does it have potential for online impact?
  • Can it be sustained, scaled, or adapted elsewhere after the grant ends?
7.8
(B) Innovation and learning
  • Does it take an Innovative approach to solving a key problem?
  • Is the potential impact greater than the risks?
  • Can we measure success?
7.0
(C) Ability to execute
  • Can the scope be accomplished in 6 months?
  • How realistic/efficient is the budget?
  • Do the participants have the necessary skills/experience?
7.8
(D) Community engagement
  • Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often?
  • Does it have community support?
  • Does it support diversity?
8.2
Comments from the committee:
  • This project has potential to increase quality and scope and make an online impact in a sustainable way.
  • Offers support to smaller wikis to get more useful content translated.
  • The applicant appears to have a lot of potential energy, backers and experience.
  • Introducing new translation capability for smaller languages would be a good thing for the movement to get involved with. It could open the door for other future similar projects.
  • If this works, the approach could be adapted to Frisian/Dutch/Afrikaans.
  • Content Translation encourages growth in projects, and can be very easily measured.
  • The testimonials of people like Nikerabbit suggest that this project can be done.
  • Applicants are actual developers of an upstream project that Content Translation service uses (Apertium) and seem to have full support of the relevant engineers from the wikimedia side of things.
  • The project seems to have a lot of support
  • Supports diversity in improving smaller language wikipedias
  • I would like to see some safeguarding against mass creation of articles produced by bots. The creation of articles with the translation tool should involve at least some amount of human quality control.
  • Translation tools can produce a lot of bugs and the effort of 3 full-time person-months to do this integration may be too costly at this time. If other languages want to replicate the effort, it will continue to be costly each time.
I have no idea what the last bullet means, it looks like a misunderstanding. Nemo 08:48, 18 November 2015 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for the comments! Regarding bot articles: The Content Translation tool is a UI for humans, and it warns you if you try to save something that looks like it hasn't been post-edited (if it looks too much like the plain machine translation output). You also have to click for each paragraph you want to add an MT suggestion for, so you can't translate a whole article with one click. Note also that it already includes MT support for many other language pairs, just not these. Regarding replication, yes creating high quality MT pairs is costly, but note that this project involves expanding the monolingual data as well as bilingual – so any new pairs that connect into Danish/Swedish/Norwegian will gain from the work (in particular Swedish monolingual data for this project). Also, bilingual dictionaries (and to a certain extent grammatical transfer rules) can be "crossed" – so the work done on Swedish-Danish and Danish-Norwegian will create initial translation data for Swedish-Norwegian here. If you later have some Icelandic-Danish dictionary, you could cross that with Swedish-Norwegian to create some data for Icelandic-Norwegian, and so on. (I'm not sure what "produce a lot of bugs" refers to though.) --Unhammer (talk) 11:31, 18 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

Round 2 2015 decision edit

 

Congratulations! Your proposal has been selected for an Individual Engagement Grant.

The committee has recommended this proposal and WMF has approved funding for the full amount of your request, $10,000

Comments regarding this decision:
We appreciate that this well-equipped team will offer its expertise in Apertium to article translation among Scandinavian Wikipedias. We very much look forward to benefiting from your bent for step-by-step documentation, which will pave the way for other closely related language communities to adopt similar projects.

Next steps:

  1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement and setup a monthly check-in schedule.
  2. Review the information for grantees.
  3. Use the new buttons on your original proposal to create your project pages.
  4. Start work on your project!
Questions? Contact us.
Return to "IEG/Pan-Scandinavian Machine-assisted Content Translation" page.