User talk:Henri de Solages

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Hello, Henri de Solages, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

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[edit] Hi

Interested in machine translation for lesser-used languages? We should talk. - Francis Tyers · 15:01, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

In answer to your question:

It would be useful to say if there is a free MT project somewhere, and what could be the cost of building such a system for one pair of languages (for instance in term of the capital of a company doing the job). My underlying question is: "Is it reasonable to expect/promote a MT for rare languages, and if yes under which economic model (community, proprietary)? " (I live in Mongolia.)--Henri de Solages 12:46, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

I'm working with a group that focusses on machine translation for lesser-used languages (see Apertium). Depending on the closeness of the language pair, the cost in terms of man-years is from 1 and up. For example, Spanish-Catalan, Spanish-Portuguese may be written from scratch by one person in a year. Anything more could take more time. Of course, more than one person can work on it at any one time, and it is not necessary to work full-time (for example in a volunteer context).
In terms of economic model, the only one I support is free software / open source (which would correspond to your "community" I think). We actively try to promote lesser-used languages (for example Occitan and Aranese), and would welcome collaborators. If you have any more questions, we can discuss things by email. You can email me using the email user feature. - Francis Tyers · 15:07, 27 June 2007 (UTC)