MS to launch Wikibhasha to boost multilingual content
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 19 October 2010, 11:48 IST   |    2 Comments
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MS to launch Wikibhasha to boost multilingual content
Bangalore: Microsoft revealed that they will soon launch the beta version Wikibhasha, a multilingual content creation tool for Wikipedia. The tool will help to simplify and speed up the process of creating multilingual content in Wikipedias. Wikibhasa derives from the well-known term 'wiki' denoting collaboration, and 'bhasha' which means 'language' in Hindi and Sanskrit and will serve multiple purposes to contributors of wiki like finding content from other Wikipedia articles, translate the content into other languages and then compose new articles or enhance existing articles in multilingual Wikipedias. It will support content creation in more than 30 languages and also enable easy content creation in non-English Wikipedias by leveraging the large volume of English Wikipedia content as the source of information. Microsoft Research and Wikimedia Foundation will also work closely with the Wikipedia user communities focusing on content creation in Arabic, German, Hindi, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish. They also hope to inspire a new wave of multilingual content creation. "We're always happy to see work on improving multilingual collaboration between wikis," said Danese Cooper, CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation. "Microsoft Research is doing some interesting work with WikiBhasha, and we're very pleased that it chose to share its client code in open source as well." The browser-based tool offers a user interface layer on top of the target-language Wikipedia during content creation, integrating content discovery with linguistic and collaborative services and focusing the use on content creation in the target Wikipedia through a three-step process which guides the user through content discovery and sourcing, composing a local-language article and publishing it in the target Wikipedia. The tool which is supported by MS Machine Translation system and MS Collaborative Translations Framework and conceptualized by Multilingual Systems Group currently works on Windows Internet Explorer (7.0 and 8.0) on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 and on Firefox (3.5 or above) on Linux Fedora (11 and 12), Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

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