Baka-Tsuki:Machine Translation Guidelines

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This page is a DRAFT.

Please use caution. There many be inaccurate or incomplete material.

This page describes Baka-Tsuki's default policy towards machine translations.

Please note that this policy is a convention—in some cases, individual translation projects may have stricter policies with regards to machine translations. Please check Project-Specific Guidelines to learn more about your project's stance on machine translations. All members should follow these guidelines by default.

Definition of a Machine Translation

Henceforth, the act of machine translating is defined as the conversion of a sentence or phrase of more than 8 characters (in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc.) into another language via a translating program (babel, ATLAS, google, etc).

Guidelines

1. Any translation performed with a heavy reliance on machines for more than 1/2 of the text will be considered as a machine translation script.

• This also includes romaji translations and other kinds of work done by people who obviously depend on unreliable methods to produce a translation.

2. Machine translations may not be added to the wiki without prior approval. Users wishing to add machine translations may do so in the appropriate machine translation sandbox forum.

• All machine translations on the wiki will be tagged as such, but tagging the page does not exempt it from requiring approval.
• At the moment, external links to MTL are not eligible for approval and therefore may not be added.

3. In cases where machine translation has been thoroughly checked and revised by someone with a solid understanding of source language, it may be granted approval by administration to be added to the wiki.

• In addition to approval by administration, the project manager must also give consent.
• If a user thinks their text will meet approval, they should submit a request to the administration contact page and give a link to the translated text in the forums. Administration will contact the user via the wiki talk page or private message in the forums.
• Administration will likely have the machine translation script checked/approved by a senior translator, and will ask the user questions before granting approval.
• The content will be checked based on the immediate language it was translated from, and translated into.

e.g. Japanese -> Chinese -> English script.

Japanese to English could be checked.

Chinese to English could be checked.

Japanese to Chinese will not be checked.

• There needs to be people who not only contribute to make the translation faithful, but also a respected translator who obviously knows his stuff to check if the work has been done right.
• Still, this is just the minimum acceptable. If a project manager thinks that the minimum acceptable is not good enough, he's free to forbid machine translation scripts.

4. Chapters that fail to meet the requirements will be deleted permanently.

• This is non-negotiable. For the translators who would like to want their work back though, we may help you for that. But anyway, a machine translation script that doesn't meet the minimum required will be deleted.
• Existing machine translated chapters may or may not be removed on a case by case basis.

5. Approved chapters will be tagged clearly as a machine translation script.

• No more confusion surrounding machine translation script. A -MTL name extension will be added to every chapter, in addition to a template, {{MTL}}, indicating that the script has been produced by a machine (the "Preview" tag and template should no longer be used).

• Machine translated chapters existing prior to this policy that have not been reviewed should also receive the -MTL name extension, however they should include the template {{MTL-old}} instead of {{MTL}}, which includes a note that they have not been reviewed by this policy.

6. Any chapter done by a machine can be overwritten by a human translator.

• Unless it's a translator guess-lating and inventing stuff out of blue, a human translator who shows the ability and the effort can overwrite the machine translation script with his own work.

Once a machine translated script has fulfilled all the requirements as shown by the guidelines, please be aware that the script will become Baka-Tsuki Wiki-communist state property.

Baka-Tsuki staff have the final authority to remove the script, provided that they have fully transparent and accountable reasons.

Templates

• Template:MTL for machine translated chapters that receive approval to be added to the wiki
• Template:MTL-old for machine translated chapters that were posted prior to the implantation of this policy and have not been reviewed or approved.