Wikipedia:Google Translate

This is an essay.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

In November 2016, Google Neural Machine Translation was introduced,^[1] resulting in a significant increase in the accuracy of machine translation. What does this mean for the use of Google Translate on Wikipedia?

Recent research

Jackson, Jeffrey L; Kuriyama, Akira; Anton, Andreea; Choi, April; Fournier, Jean-Pascal; Geier, Anne-Kathrin; Jacquerioz, Frederique; Kogan, Dmitry; Scholcoff, Cecilia; Sun, Rao (30 July 2019). "The Accuracy of Google Translate for Abstracting Data From Non–English-Language Trials for Systematic Reviews". Annals of Internal Medicine. 171 (9): 677. doi:10.7326/M19-0891. ISSN 0003-4819.
DuBose, Joy (3 October 2019). "Russian, Japanese, and Latin Oh My! Using Technology to Catalog Non-English Language Titles". Cataloging & Classification Quarterly. 57 (7–8): 496–506. doi:10.1080/01639374.2019.1671929.
Michael, Erica B.; et al. (2018). "Human use of machine translation to extract information from texts". In Lacruz, Isabel; Jääskeläinen, Riitta (eds.). Innovation and Expansion in Translation Process Research. John Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 191–. ISBN 978-90-272-6475-6.

Pros and cons

Pros

The accuracy of Google Translate continues to improve, and in many cases approaches the accuracy of human translation
Use of non-English sources can help counter systemic bias on Wikipedia, which skews to Anglocentric and Eurocentric perspectives

Cons

Accuracy may not be sufficient for all uses, and human translation is still more accurate
The reliability and due weight of non-English sources must be established

Caveats

Translation into English is usually more accurate than translation from English
Translation from languages related to English (i.e., Indo-European languages) is more accurate than translation from unrelated languages

References

^ Lewis-Kraus, Gideon (14 December 2016). "The Great A.I. Awakening". The New York Times. Retrieved 1 February 2020.

External links

As of 2019, Wikipedians can use Google translations under a free license (cc-by-sa-3.0)
Previously, Wikimedia Legal had said that Google's translations likely do not create new copyright burdens

[1] Lewis-Kraus, Gideon (14 December 2016). "The Great A.I. Awakening". The New York Times. Retrieved 1 February 2020.

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