Thanks for bringing up translation. I intended to bring this up in a separate note.
We decided to take on translated 'summaries' this year fairly late into the production process. It seemed like we could handle this as a parallel process without slowing down the main production. That turned out to be more or less true as the small translation group we worked with (based in southern California) was able to tackle translation and layout design (not creating the design, but basically filling in the blanks).
For this first effort with our annual report we wanted to outsource the translation. The most significant reason for this was the financials section. We wanted to have a company that had specialist experience in translating US financial terminology and data. We have to do this with great caution due to tax and financial regulations in the US. A miscommunication of our finance data could cause real problems, and we didn't want to put a volunteer in the position of making those tough calls.
The languages chosen were a balance between our geographic priorities (Brazil, Middle East, India) and our widest base of donors and contributors from other countries. It's imperfect, as always - we want to do more in the future, but we needed to get started. These choices are by no means part of a permanent pattern for WMF in terms of translation. Now that we have a better understanding of the process we're hoping to expand it for next year - but more importantly finding ways to get volunteers involved.
And yes, I think a community proof-read is another next step for next year. We were trying to strike a balance between speed and quality/detail. But we'll try more next year (and we're collecting notes and practices for the production team right now - so this is all timely and relevant!).
jay
On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 4:57 AM, Seb35 seb35wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:29:51 -0800, Jay Walsh jwalsh@wikimedia.org wrote:
The Wikimedia Foundation is happy to announce the release of the 2010-11 Annual Report, which is now posted on the WMF Wiki at http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Annual_Report
Thanks for this beautiful Annual Report :) Much appreciated also the translations!
I have two points I would like see to happen in the process of the creation of this report:
- a proofread by the community before the final issue; perhaps I missed
it, but I didn’t find anything on foundation-l; for example it has been remarked a typo on the second page "Jean Javier" -> "Jean Janvier", corrected in the wiki version
- a proofread of the translated versions; I didn’t noticed anything on
translation-l; I noticed a couple of translation errors in the French version (example: "155 millions of edits" -> "155 millions de textes", but "textes" = "texts", "edits" = "éditions")
I know it’s quite difficult to synchronize PDF versions and wiki versions, but I find it’s worth trying.
Sébastien
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