Jurawiki experimenting with machine translation

From Handakte WebLAWg: MT in Jurawiki.
There is a German law Wiki, Jurawiki, mentioned here before. It offers machine translation into English, Chinese (traditional and simplified characters), Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
The translation is still in its early stages, however. I would be curious to know how well this works for users of other languages, although I’m not sure how much demand there would be.
Presumably the databases can be filled with the appropriate vocabulary, or the MT system can be told to choose legal terminology, which should help most of the time.

Rechtspfleger (a sort of sub-judge) comes out as Right Male Nurse. This should be avoidable in the long term, if an entry is made for Rechtspfleger – this will then be given priority over Recht + Pfleger. (Krankenpfleger is a male nurse, Recht is either law or right, a difficult distinction for MT programs).

As is confirmed by a comment by Ralf Zosel in Handakte WebLAWg, the system they are trying is www.worldlingo.com. A cursory glance shows some involvement of Systran, a system used to some extent by the EU. I am absolutely not an expert on this, but I remember Pete Jones in the EU in Brussels saying if a letter comes in in German, he has a choice between an immediate MT translation or waiting for two weeks for a human translation. I think that is Systran, which has always had a good reputation and is said to be making some language pairs available to Worldlingo.You can click right through to the Rechtspflegergesetz, all translated into English, with a warning that this is just a rough translation. The main problem is that the Right male nurse is never really explained.

Some words are not in the dictionary, of course, and problems arise with combinations like WieUndWoJuraStudieren (HowAndWhereToStudyLaw), although since the program managed to break down Rechtspfleger, it ought perhaps to be able to manage this too – perhaps the capital letters confused it.

Attempts to translate the list of topics failed, since the servers at Worldlingo were apparently overloaded.

You have to start on the first page and then choose your language, rather than translating from the page you happen to be on. I missed a button to go back to German after translating the first page into English.

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