Having done contextual inquiries with a number of professional translators, and having done a bit of translation myself, I can attest that it is very hard to translate sentences out of context.
So being able to translate a sentence in context, for example by clicking on it in the actual UI where it appears, is bound to be superior.
Alain
From: translators-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:translators-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Bence Damokos Sent: August 2, 2008 1:13 PM To: Wikimedia Translators Subject: Re: [Translators-l] many costly analyse the function phone call.
From personal experience I would say that its quite hard for 1) as a translator to guess at points where does a given sentence go, and what do the numerous "$1" become in use 2) as a visitor to a site using the translation to report or just know how and what to do to make the translation better. I think a solution like that of Facebook might be good: if you enable it in the settings you would have a link in the corner that would say "translate" you could click on anything on that given page and either provide the translation for it, or review the translated version and the attached comments (which then would have to be sent to TranslateWiki somehow). Otherwise its quite tiresome for the end-user to go and find the actual sentence again on TWiki (as the search doesn't search in the MediaWiki namespace by default), and than make the change (or be turned away by fear of disrupting something, after seeing the dollar signs for the included sub-messages).
Regards, Bence Damokos
On Sat, Aug 2, 2008 at 7:05 PM, Aphaia aphaia@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 1:54 AM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2008/8/2 Anders Wegge Jakobsen wegge@wegge.dk:
I will continue pointing out those hilarious examples of worse-than-none translations that ensues from the naive thought that anyone will ever proofread a translation, when it has first been marked as translated.
Perhaps it would be possible to add basic validation functionality (not necessarily something as sophisticated as FlaggedRevs) to TranslateWiki?
If it is, it is more than great I think. See also the thread about http://jp.librarything.com where they provide the registered users the way to evaluate the current version, not only the opportunity to submit the alternative.
If the entire site has a feature to recommend an alternative to system messages (since it is read-only for most visitors anyway), like Google Translator gives its visitors, I think it better from the point of proofreading, but not sure it is balanced with the other aspect & workload.
Then the quality of a translation could be ranked by the number of people who have looked at and validated it.
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