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@gmail.com À : translators-l@wikimedia.org Envoyé le : Samedi, 23 Décembre 2006, 11h20mn 21s Objet : [Translators-l] What to do with outdated translated pages?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?
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2006/12/23, louis bodo louis_bodo@yahoo.fr:
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.
In my opinion, including the whole message is not the best way of doing it. I prefer to quote what I see as relevant in context, and reply beneath - that is what I have been taught is good netiquette. (I am aware that opinions on netiquett vary.)
Most email clients clearly show the difference between quoted text and new text - with little ">'s" in the beginning of each line, or a blue line to the the left of the quoted text and sometimes also the right. I do not think this is a general problem. I see you use yahoo; if yahoo does not show you the difference between quoted and new text, I suggest you check if there is any settings in your yahoo account that you can change. If that does not work, you might want to switch to another kind of email. (I can give you an invitation to gmail, if you like. Just send me a private e-mail.)
/habj
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