By: lew 
on 13 January 2011 - 13:32
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The ministry of ICT (MICT) just announced that it paid 10M baht to hire a company to use a traslation to translate all wikipedia page.
Mr. Juti Krailerk, the minister of MICT, said in an interview that he just ordered CAT Telecom, the state owned telecom operator, to hire a company called AsiaOnline to use its software to translate more than 30M articles from wikipedia to Thai language. AsiaOnline which is hosting a advertisements-driven website founded by Bob Hayward, the ex-Gartner analyst. All contents in the web are machine translated from Wikipedia.
In the age of free services such as Google Translation or Yahoo! Bable Fish, why Thai people has to pay 10M to give contents to a private owned company is still unclear. I doubt about Mr. Juti's knowledge in IT as the cabinet once has a minister who not use email himself.
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That's really shame. I thinks this money should donate wikipedia more than hire some company to translate with "machine". It's easy to do it by me, single programmer! My old project is related to Google Translate about mass text file translation. What a worst money.
มันไม่ง่ายเลยที่จะทำ GIF ให้มีขนาดน้อยกว่า 20kB
First thing first, We have to admit that online Thai translators nowadays sucks XD
It's worth 10M in the long term ONLY IF the translation software could translate with more than 80% correction rate. However, in my opinion, it's quite hard to achieve that.
I agree with the idea to translate wiki in to Thai but It should not be translate by a software.
My point is what Thai people will get from this deal.
The content is hosted on the company's website. The company can monetize with advertisements.
What do we really get? The content? The algorithm?
lewcpe.com, @wasonliw
Oh! I read again and understand just now. Before when I read this topic, I think all translated contents that put into th.wikipedia but when I think wikipedia should have some editors that should not allow crappy text post on wiki. Alternate way should be post on other website.
God, I think about some advertisements too such as Google Adsense. If they do that, It's very bad.
What do we really get? - I don't know either. Maybe It's a lot of crappy text that we can read and laugh about how this text can be really suck.
Humun translation is best solution.
มันไม่ง่ายเลยที่จะทำ GIF ให้มีขนาดน้อยกว่า 20kB
Translation software has really bad results. You can translate some food recipe and result is some text that looks like a song. LOL
Wikipedia is encyclopaedia. It use in most research and reference. I don't want to see new thesis that has some bad reference. Computer can't replace human in this project.
มันไม่ง่ายเลยที่จะทำ GIF ให้มีขนาดน้อยกว่า 20kB
No, Wikipedia is not a reference.
ICT should employ me !!!
What a shame.... id do this for only 9M ;)