Hello all,
Attended the Recent Changes Camp in Montreal last May. This was a bilingual event (French
and English). During the camp, there was some discussion about how to leverage the fact
that many of the attendees spoke both languages and might be able to provide real-time
translation for those who don't.
I wonder if we could do something like that for WikiMania, say to provide Chinese
<-> English translations?
Here's a scenario that illustrates how this might work.
There are two projectors in the conference room.
One projector displays the slides of the speaker, the other one displays a web browser
with a session of SynchEdit opened.
Note: SynchEdit is a web-based collaborative synchronous editor. Many people can
simulataneously edit the same document using no more than a web browser. Changes made by
any of those users appear in the copies seen by all other users.
The speaker, let's call him Jin-Hai, starts speaking in Chinese. Immediately, a person
in the room who speaks Chinese and English, let's call her Yu-Bi, spontaneously starts
typing the English translation of the first sentence into SynchEdit (she has a laptop
connected to this SynchEdit session using the wireless connection provided at the
conference).
After a few seconds, Yu-Bi is running behind. So another person in the room, call him
Ming-Li, spontaneously starts typing the translation of the second sentence below the text
that Yu-Bi is typing. Two other volunteer translators join it. The four of them are able
together to keep up, and still follow the talk.
Then, John from the audience asks a question in English. Louise who is fluent in Chinese,
starts typing the Chinese translation into SynchEdit. She's spontaneously joined by
Yan-Yu and Xiao-Jian. Jin-Hai, the speaker, who is not that fluent in English looks at the
screen in order to make sure he has understood the question well. He then answers back in
Chinese, and Yu-Bi, Ming-Li type translation into English.
Could this actually work? I must admit, I don't know the answer. But it would be neat
to findout. It's a very wikiesque approach to simultaneou translation.
Maybe it's not realistic to expect that people in the room will spontaneously start
doing this and coordinate in real time. Maybe we need to recruit a number of volunteers
ahead of time so that they could practice ahead of time?
Also, I'm not sure how well SynchEdit supports chinese characters.
Opinions, suggestions anyone?
----
Alain Désilets, National Research Council of Canada
Chair, WikiSym 2007
2007 International Symposium on Wikis
Wikis at Work in the World:
Open, Organic, Participatory Media for the 21st Century
http://www.wikisym.org/ws2007/