If I understand you correctly this is a term base with fixed terms used to describe the images. Such term bases are very common in archives, and often they are standardized.
Often it is possible to translate between two sets of terms, that is some terms will match with our categories, but if this is not possible it is better to be able to search the terms as they are. If the terms are in Dutch they will not be available for searching in the language of choice for the most users.
There will be a very moderate a mouth of work to run the term base through Google translate and manually check the result, and then make a script to translate the term base into alternate languages. This will greatly extend the availability of the images.
It is not unlikely the term base already relates to some other public term base, perhaps it is a good idea to check it out. It would anyhow be interesting to make provisions to map term bases from Dublin Core and IPTC, probably also others, as an integral part of Commons.
John
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi, Why should the term base be translated ? Is it not more important to be gained by getting all this material in the public domain ??
I do however agree with you. All the material that is about Indonesia should be translated to Indonesian. For them it is very much the opening up of material that is part of their cultural history. Translating it into English does not make it easier for Indonesians to find this material. Thanks, GerardM
2009/7/15 John at Darkstar vacuum@jeb.no
At least the term base should be translated. John
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi, I have been in discussion with the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam about making their material available on Commons. The Tropenmuseum has an important collection on the colonial past of the Netherlands and contains a rich collection on Suriname and Indonesia. The initial talks are about 100.000 images.
The annotations of this material is all in Dutch. It will come with
unique
identifiers back to the physical object in the Tropenmuseum and it will
come
with the termbase for the images; this termbase is as I understand it the equivalent of our categories. Some of the material has a partial
translation
in English and, this can be provided to us as well.
The key issue I want to raise is that there are hundreds of museums in
the
Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname all using Dutch there are more museums
in
Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein who speak German .... While
we
aim to improve our front end to allow for easy uploads, we do not provide language support. Language support will help people find pictures in
their
language and will help the matching of categories into other languages. Thanks, GerardM _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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