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by sneak 1055 days ago
"translated by an advertising company" is akin to "Tor was funded by the US government" - it's basically organizational ad hominem.

Google's translations are fine and are high quality and don't yet (or in the foreseeable future) inject ad copy into the translations (like they do on eg Google Maps for POIs).
2 comments
trashburger 1055 days ago
That's apples and oranges though. Tor is out of control of the US military as this point (+/- your tinfoil hat level), whereas Google Translate was created and is owned solely by Google. I'm not saying GP is fully correct but context is important.

I personally think using transformers for, well, transforming input into another language is going to be a great approach once hardware catches up for local offline use at a reasonable speed and hallucinations are minimized.

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nologic01 1055 days ago
Corporate entities come and go. They bait-and-switch at will as they are ultimately only answering to legal obligations and in particular shareholders. It would be odd to overlay such a liability and uncertainty on top of wikipedia.

While abstraction is not the same as translation, if the wikipedia community wants specifically a translation service that is more tightly integrated into the platform imho it should be a fully open source project.

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