[Olpc-Haiti] translation tools for Kreyòl for OLPC/SugarLabs

[Alexander Dupuy]

Previously I wrote:
> And a useful link to Kreyòl translation data (parallel texts & 
> terminology glossaries) provided by CMU:
>
> http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/haitian/text/
>
> While Microsoft has already released a machine-translation service 
> based on that (and other) data: 
> http://blogs.msdn.com/translation/archive/2010/01/24/announcement-haitian-creole-support-in-bing-translator-and-other-microsoft-translator-powered-services.aspx 
>
> it is very unlikely to be useful for quality translations.  However, 
> the glossaries can be helpful as an aid to manual translation.

The open-source stand-alone translation tool Virtaal (developed by the 
same team as the Pootle on-line translation system used by OLPC / 
SugarLabs) now has support to use the Microsoft Translation service - see

http://translate.org.za/blogs/dwayne/en/content/virtaal-supports-haitian-creole-through-machine-translation-plugin

There is no support for this in Pootle yet, but you can download the PO 
files from Pootle, perform translation in Virtaal, and then upload the 
PO files back.  (This is most useful for someone who will be the only 
translator working on a particular project file, and will be translating 
a fairly large number of entries.)

The quality of the Microsoft translation service doesn't appear to be 
too bad; the example in the screenshot shows:

With this file you can learn about translation using Virtaal

translated into Kreyòl as:

Ak dokiman sa nou kapab aprann de traduction yo ki t'itilize Virtaal

Without really knowing any Kreyòl this certainly has some errors 
(shouldn't it be "traduksyon"?) and probably a bunch more at grammatical 
levels that I can't see, but this certainly gives you a starting point, 
and for some translators this could be helpful.

Something that those of us who don't have Kreyòl fluency could do to 
help in this context might be to see if it is possible to port Virtaal 
as an XO bundle that could run under Sugar (porting it entirely to the 
Sugar user interface, might be too much effort, although possible, since 
it is written in Python and has Fedora RPMs).  This could allow people 
with XOs to work on translations and see the results immediately 
(Virtaal is able to edit not just PO files, but also the .mo files that 
are actually used in the system).

@alex

-- 
mailto:alex.dupuy at mac.com