Francis M. Tyers

Adiu Francis,

Not sure what is your level in Occitan, quite sure about the English one, so I write in English.

About Apertium: IMHO it is a pretty MT tool helping to understand other languages. As from my (quite old now: ended in 1985) Machine Translation experience, we cannot ensure a 100% correctness without human editing. We recently had a face to face meeting with another admin (Mertyl) and some regular users of the Oc wikipedia. We agreed that we have not enough articles (maybe, but we find no need to include each individual Pokémon ;-) but we have a pretty good quality. We get the daily help of Vivarés, who is one of the best living specialists of Occitan (authored many books on Provençal and Lower Vivarese) and provides a very clean editing of any article. I am not sure he'd cope with more activity.

For myself, I'm facing some peaks of professional / personal activities not allowing a regular edition work.

The student should know:

• occitan is very far from French (phonetics, syntax) - in fact French is (with Romanian) the less romance of romance languages. So his knowledge of French won't be enough...
• wikipedia is full of rules and info boxes that are not fit for machine translation

By the way, if I can help, I'll help.

Regards, --— Joan Francés B. ^{(me´n parlar)} 24 novembre de 2010 a 12.57 (UTC)

Dear M. Tyers, many thanks for this project. I agree with what JF Blanc stated. I would add that, indeed, there is a loss of some indispensable articles ; because of that, our encyclopedia is not really an effective one so far. I do not know if this could resolve everything at once, but, as far as occitan is concerned, it might be interesting to give a try. Beside, sometimes, occitan articles are already directly translated from catalan.

From a more personal point of view, I would add that occitan has at least 5 main dialectes (very close to each other though) and that it would be interesting with such a translating software or device to have the possibility to choose tranlating in more than one dialect (so we can keep wikipedia representative of occitan diversity and so the reader can appreciate each main form).

I would be more than happy to help if there is any need, particularly concerning this last point.

sincerely, --Lembeye (d) 24 novembre de 2010 a 22.23 (UTC)