habj,
I am very pleased that you have brought the problem up.
I had a suggestion some time ago, which is related to this problem, but at that time I
have not brought it to public attention.
My concern was translating an organisational document such as the bylaws which could
possibly change with time, and my thoughts were well founded. I started to translate the
bylaws, but found that a new one was already discussed.
I suggested that such documents should have an Issue number attached to them, so that the
translator is aware which version he is translating. The superseeded articles could, or
perhaps should be archived. I also envisaged that such articles should have the date of
issue, the name of the board member who authorised its creation and/or approved it. With
translations Translator and Copy editor would substitute the names of the Authoriser and
Approver.
I now came up with another problem and suggestion.
When we send messages to a group of people such as Translators for easy reference we leave
the original text in the response, which after a number of responses can grow to a fair
size and it is a waste of time searching through all these to see what is new.
What I would suggest is that if we would write our response in a different police style
(eg Arial), and/or size we could easily see the latest communication, which thereafter
could be changed bach to the original for the next response.
A third problem is knowing who translates what ? When the community is not large enough
for a translation coordinator, but more than one person is prepared to do translation work
a system ought to be set up which tells you if a translation has been taken into hand or
not. Once it has been translated, it is true, we have a record of further stages of the
document, such as copy editing etc, but we ought to signal immediately as soon as someone
starts a document.
It is of course possible that some of the solutions to these problems are already being
solved or have been solved. They are thoughts, which might reduce any time wastage.
LouisBB
----- Message d'origine ----
De : habj <sweetadelaide(a)gmail.com>
À : translators-l(a)wikimedia.org
Envoyé le : Samedi, 23 Décembre 2006, 11h20mn 21s
Objet : [Translators-l] What to do with outdated translated pages?
I have just started to look into the translation requests. I wonder a
couple of things, and I bring it to the list since I am sure there
must be plenty other translators in similar situations.
The pages for the current fundraiser will only be used for a couple of
weeks, but many other pages remain for a long time. Those pages
generally get changed and updated as reality changes. In the current
translation requests, there is for example the page on the Board, and
on the current staff. In both cases, new people will come and others
will leave. If a page like this is translated and not updated, it
looks very bad. Old or wrong information is often worse than no
information at all, and in this case outdated translated info will
prevent people to instead visit the corresponding page in a language
where the info is correct.
If I translate a page, I can not promise to be here to update it
later. If my local community was bigger - and/or more generally
interested in stuff above the local community level - I could count on
other people replacing me, but as things are now I can that is
something I can hope for but not count on. If we don't implement some
kind of system to deal with outdated pages, I am a little afraid of
translating such pages. I feel that in the end I might have done more
bad than good.
How can we deal with outdated translations? One _could_ tag a
translated page saying which version of another page it is translated
from. Others who don't speak the language in question can then decide
whether the information is too outdated to be around, and somehow
remove the page - I suppose redirecting it to the English, or other
suitable, version is a working idea. Does anyone have a better
suggestion?
/habj
_______________________________________________
Translators-l mailing list
Translators-l(a)Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/translators-l
___________________________________________________________________________
Yahoo! Mail réinvente le mail ! Découvrez le nouveau Yahoo! Mail et son interface
révolutionnaire.
http://fr.mail.yahoo.com