ASTANA – The Kazakh language is now among the offerings of the Google Translate online global translating system, founder and director of theWikiBilim Public Foundation Rauan Kenzhekhanuly announced on Dec. 12.

Kazakh joins the 90 other languages available through the translation system, which is accessible on computers and mobile devices. WikiBilim is a nonprofit organisation operating in Kazakhstan that develops and promotes online educational content in the Kazakh language.

“One and a half year ago, we started to think how to include the Kazakh language in Google Translate. We addressed this question to the Google Company and were told that it would be necessary to provide the system with a large number of mirror translations from Kazakh into English and back. This would give the translating system an opportunity to seize the algorithm of Kazakh and after a while be able to build its initial translation options,” Kenzhekhanuly said.

The WikiBilim team started off translating Wikipedia into Kazakh, according to Kenzhekhanuly.

“The Kazakh Wikipedia only had 7,000 articles and four people working on the translations before we actively started to translate content into Kazakh. Our task was to assemble a team or a community that would undertake the task to translate and edit articles into Kazakh. Today, we have some 210,000 articles, and 350 people are constantly working on the project. By translating Wikipedia, we created a database and algorithms that allowed us to transcribe the alphabets properly,” he said as he explained the process during a Dec. 15 briefing at the Central Communications Service. More.

See: The Astana Times

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