Hi, Alain and all
On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 10:26 PM, Desilets, Alain Alain.Desilets@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca wrote:
On 26/03/2008, Casey Brown cbrown1023.ml@gmail.com wrote:
Hello all!
This is a slight poke, ;-) it seems it has been about a week since Mark sent this e-mail and we have translations in only es, fr, and zh-hans; thanks to those who translated those!
Hm IANAT (I am not a translator), but maybe you should wait until pages are complete before asking for translations. The dates, and the application form, the two most important parts, are not available yet. What is the point of translating something that is near useless in its current form? Better to wait for the complete document first, I would guess.
This is the way that translation is done in traditional environments. Documents are first written in a master language (usually English), and only when this master version reaches a "final" stage will translation proceed.
However, this is not a very wiki-way of doing things. One of the strengths of wiki is that it allows small early drafts of documents to be published very early, and allow the community to grow and improve it in an organic fashion.
Totally agreed. We here face two different cultural traditions - one is quite old and another is young - conflicted and trying to get a new horizon to land. Again, traditional request for translation come only after the source material done and it has its virtue as Brianna suggested: it is a standard way of industrical age to order a contractor something. It works very well, since translation is somehow artisan works, need a time, concentration and of course expertise.
On the other hand it is far from Wiki Way, anything can be altered swiftly and people may be aware there will be no "final stable version". Its strength is exactly in this point - anyone can edit, modified and it is determinative. It is open, and that is its virtue. I expect all of us - who enjoy wiki collaboration know its potential and weakness. It fits to handle things very up-to-date and quickly modified - Wikinewsies and Wikipedians may know it very well - and in the case data will be soon fixed but not yet and the other parts are on the contrary fixed and ready to go into the next step - in this context translation.
I agree though that given current translation support in wiki engines like MediaWiki, the traditional way may be more appropriate.
I am not sure MediaWiki is an architecture which fits more to the traditional way but the general tendency of translators seems to be inclined to the traditional way. I rembemer some translators were upset or complained when they saw the source materials unready or modified after we have asked them to translate. In this reason I tend to avoid asking for translation when the draft is still edited, but personally I don't mind to work on ongoing materials - is that exactly what we are doing on content translations from one wiki to the oter?
One of my carreer goals right now is to change that and figure out what tools and processes might allow translation in a more organic wiki-way:
"Translation the Wiki Way": http://www.wikisym.org/ws2006/proceedings/p19.pdf
Thanks for putting it to this list. I recommend you particular who leads a team as a coordinator to give a look. You may enjoy it and find it interesting as I did so.
I'm happy to report that we are not far from this in my opinion. For example, the TikiWiki community is currently implementing features to support this sort of thing, and the Mozilla Foundation is seriously considering using those features to enable the collaborative authoring and translation of the Firefox documentation in multiple languages:
http://www.wiki-translation.com/Cross+Lingual+Wiki+Engine+Project&bl=y
Sorry if this sounds like a plug, but I couldn't resist.
No problem, and thanks for giving nice foods of thought strongly relevant to wiki and translation :)