On 26/03/2008, Casey Brown
<cbrown1023.ml(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hello all!
This is a slight poke, ;-) it seems it has been about a week since
Mark sent this e-mail and we have translations in only es, fr, and
zh-hans; thanks to those who translated those!
Hm IANAT (I am not a translator), but maybe you should wait until
pages are complete before asking for translations. The dates, and the
application form, the two most important parts, are not available yet.
What is the point of translating something that is near useless in its
current form? Better to wait for the complete document first, I would
guess.
This is the way that translation is done in traditional environments. Documents are first
written in a master language (usually English), and only when this master version reaches
a "final" stage will translation proceed.
However, this is not a very wiki-way of doing things. One of the strengths of wiki is that
it allows small early drafts of documents to be published very early, and allow the
community to grow and improve it in an organic fashion.
I agree though that given current translation support in wiki engines like MediaWiki, the
traditional way may be more appropriate. One of my carreer goals right now is to change
that and figure out what tools and processes might allow translation in a more organic
wiki-way:
"Translation the Wiki Way":
http://www.wikisym.org/ws2006/proceedings/p19.pdf
I'm happy to report that we are not far from this in my opinion. For example, the
TikiWiki community is currently implementing features to support this sort of thing, and
the Mozilla Foundation is seriously considering using those features to enable the
collaborative authoring and translation of the Firefox documentation in multiple
languages:
http://www.wiki-translation.com/Cross+Lingual+Wiki+Engine+Project&bl=y
Sorry if this sounds like a plug, but I couldn't resist.
----
Alain Désilets, MASc
Agent de recherches/Research Officer
Institut de technologie de l'information du CNRC /
NRC Institute for Information Technology
alain.desilets(a)nrc-cnrc.gc.ca
Tél/Tel (613) 990-2813
Facsimile/télécopieur: (613) 952-7151
Conseil national de recherches Canada, M50, 1200 chemin Montréal,
Ottawa (Ontario) K1A 0R6
National Research Council Canada, M50, 1200 Montreal Rd., Ottawa, ON
K1A 0R6
Gouvernement du Canada | Government of Canada