Write wikis in any language with new multilingual content creation tool

Microsoft Research and Wikipedia have joined forces to launch a beta version of a new multilingual content creation tool for Wikipedia.

Named WikiBhasha ('wiki' for collaboration and 'bhasha,' the word for 'language' in Hindi and Sanskrit), the tool facilitates hassle-free content creation in more than 30 languages.

Microsoft Rearch and Wikipedia hope WikiBhasha will encourage contributors to utilize and translate the large volumes of existing English Wikipedia content and assist them to create non-English entries.

"The WikiBhasha beta holds the promise of enabling easy creation of content in multiple languages, and also of generating a large body of parallel language data for researchers to work on to further machine translation technology," said P. Anandan, managing director, Microsoft Research India in a statement to the press on October 18.

"Creating quality content in multiple languages can be greatly improved and accelerated with the active participation of the Wikipedia communities."

According to Internet World Stats, English is the most used language on the internet in 2010 followed by Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Arabic, French, Russian and Korean.

http://www.wikibhasha.org  

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/wikibabel/