I think the request for such projects should come from
the concerned
language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my simple
opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
Jean-Philippe Béland
Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad <jeblad(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Should have added that the remaining points are
somewhat less interesting
in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad idea, the
translators should be able to chose for themselves. Articles should also
be
pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie vertical articles,
as the number of editors that can handle those will be pretty small.
In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new editor!
You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.
On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad <jeblad(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
1) You must start with high quality content and
thus all articles are
extensively improved before being proposed for
translation.
Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the project.
3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts more
> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that
tool
> improved further such as having it support
specific lists of articles
that
are
deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love the
tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
Didn't mention ContentTranslation, but it should be pretty obvious.
4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in
> which
> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian
there
> is
> often already at least some content on many of the topics in question.
The
issue
than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And for
languages in which we have little content there are often few avaliable
volunteers.
I used projects below 65k articles as an example, as the chance of
competing articles are pretty low.
5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the work
> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so
languages
in which
it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a second
review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be
accepted.
I'n my original email I wrote "verified good translators". It is as
simple as "Has the editor contributed other articles at the project?"
On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 2:26 PM, James Heilman <jmh649(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> We learned a few things during the medical translation project which
> started back in 2011:
>
> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
>
> 2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP.
Thus
> we
> moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the leads of the
> English articles.
>
> 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
more
> efficient than handing around word documents.
Would love to see that
tool
> improved further such as having it support
specific lists of articles
that
> are deemed ready for translation by certain
groups. Would also love the
> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
>
> 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in
> which
> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian
there
> is
> often already at least some content on many of the topics in question.
The
> issue than becomes integration which needs an
expert Wikipedia. And for
> languages in which we have little content there are often few avaliable
> volunteers.
>
> 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the work
> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so
languages
> in which it claims to work. We often had
translations undergo a second
> review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be
> accepted.
>
> 6) I hired a coordinator for the translation project for a couple of
> years.
> The translators at TWB did not want to become Wikipedians or learn how
to
> use our systems. The coordinator created
account like TransSW001 (one
for
> each volunteer) and preloaded the article to
be translated into Content
> Translation. They than gave the volunteer translator the user name and
> password to the account.
>
> 7) Were are we at now? There are currently just over 1,000 leads of
> articles that have been improved and are ready for translation. This
> includes articles on the 440 medications that are on the WHO Essential
> List. We have worked a bit in some 100 languages. The efforts have
> resulted
> in more than 5 million works translated and integrated into different
> Wikipedias. The coordinator has unfortunately moved on to his real job
of
> teaching high school students.
>
> 8) The project continues but at a slower pace than before. The
Wikipedian
> and retired orthopedic surgeon Subas Chandra
Rout has basically single
> handedly translated nearly all 1,000 leads into Odia a language spoken
by
> 40 million people in Eastern India. The
amazing thing is that for many
of
> these topics this is the first and only
information online about it.
> Google
> translate does not even claim to work in this language. Our
partnerships
> with WMTW and medical school in Taipai
continue to translate into
Chinese.
> There the students translate and than their
translations are reviewed
by
> their profs before being posted. They
translate in groups using
hackpad to
> make it more social.
>
> I am currently working to re invigorate the project :-)
> James
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 5:51 AM, John Erling Blad <jeblad(a)gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > This discussion is going to be fun! =D
> >
> > A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k
> articles,
> > the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.
> >
> > What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators?
There
> are
> > several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles
from
> > "List of articles every Wikipedia
should have"[1] and and the ten
> thousand
> > articles from the expanded list[2].
> >
> > Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word
(about
> $1
> > for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another
> > language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
> > countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that
lacks
> > good translation tools.
> >
> > I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities,
as
> > without a base set of articles it
won't be possible to build a
> community at
> > all. By not paying for new articles, and only translating
> well-referenced
> > articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be avoided.
> Perhaps
> > we should also identify good source articles, that would be a help.
> > Translated articles should be above some minimum size, but they does
not
> > have to be full translations of the
source article.
> >
> > A real problem is that our existing lists of good articles other
> projects
> > should have is pretty much biased towards Western World, so they
need a
> lot
> > of adjustments. Perhaps such a project would identify our inherit
bias?
> >
> > [1]
> >
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_
> > Wikipedia_should_have
> > [2]
> >
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_
> > Wikipedia_should_have/Expanded
> > _______________________________________________
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>
>
> --
> James Heilman
> MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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