Grants:IEG/South African language translation bot development (SALT-BD)

statuswithdrawn

Individual Engagement Grants

South African language translation bot development (SALT-BD)

summaryBuilding a functioning translation bot for Xhosa and Zulu language Wikipedia.

targetXhosa Wikipedia, Zulu Wikipedia

strategic priorityimproving quality, increasing participation, increasing reach

amount$17,000

advisor• Wikimedia ZA

contact• seanseanpackham.com

created on11:06, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

2014 round 2

Friendly space expectations

Project idea

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

The lack of content on isiXhosa and isiZulu language Wikipedia and lack of language translation tools for Xhosa and Zulu.

What is your solution?

Development of a crowd sourcing platform to empower people to translation content for use on Xhosa and Zulu language Wikipedia whilst also used to improve a statistical language translation system for isiXhosa and isiZulu. This will then be used to develop a multilingual translation bot for use on isiXhosa and isiZulu language Wikipedias.

Project goals

The project has the following goals in order of preference:

1. Develop a isiXhosa and isiZulu language translation bot to automatically translate articles from en.Wikipedia to xh.Wikipedia and zu.Wikipedia
2. Develop an open source crowd sourcing platform
3. Increase the number of new articles on isiXhosa and isiZulu language Wikipedia by at lest XXXX number of articles each.
4. Increase the quality of Xhosa and Zulu language Wikipedia by using the human editors contributing to the platform
5. Get contributions from at least 100 Xhosa and Zulu language speakers to xh.wikipedia and zu.wikipedia through to the platform mentioned above. Thereby exposing a greater number of language speakers to the concept of editing Wikipedia.

Project plan

Budget

• Contingency fund: (Amount) USD 1,000
• Project management/software development: (Amount) USD 15,000
• Writing competition prizes: (Amount) USD 1,000
• Total Budget: USD 17,000

Community engagement

Wikimedia community:

• Wikimedia ZA
• Contact most active editors on xh.wikipedia and zu.wikipedia directly.

Translator community:

• Use existing contacts from the University of Cape Town
• Create new contacts with the University of the Western Cape and other South African universities

Focus will be on university graduates followed by university students as this will ensure a higher degree of quality and consitancy in the translations. It also allows for much easy access to an established community of language speakers.

Measures of success

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Get involved

Community Notification

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Endorsements

Do you think this project should be selected for an Individual Engagement Grant? Please add your name and rationale for endorsing this project in the list below. (Other constructive feedback is welcome on the talk page of this proposal).

• Discott (talk) 11:06, 12 March 2015 (UTC) on behalf of Wikimedia ZA