[WikiEN-l] Category translation

[Minh Nguyen]

Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> On 6/6/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 06/06/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>>
>>> That brings up another, longer term, to-do for categories: they should
>>> be language independent.  For instance [[Marie Curie]] is in de: and
>>> en: (they happen to have the same title, but even if they don't they
>>> are linked via interwiki links).  [[Kategorie:Pole]] is linked to
>>> [[Category:Polish people]].  So there should be no need to categorize
>>> Marie Curie twice (multiply by the actual number of languages which
>>> have a Polish people category and an article on Marie Curie).
>> Hmm... it won't work well.
>>
>> Basdically, there is no hard and fast en:Article <-> de:Artikel
>> relationship, there's no single "meta topic" which manifests itself in
>> specific articles in different languages. For some things, like
>> people, it does appear so; for others, it'll break down.
>>
> I don't understand that.  Interwiki links are the hard and fast
> en:Article <-> de:Artikel relationship.  Are you unaware of iw links,
> or am I misinterpreting what you're saying?  Maybe you could give an
> example?
> 
>> This is partly due to the incomplete nature of the project, but also
>> because different language communities - which, especially for
>> languages like German and Polish, represent individual and reasonably
>> distinct cultures in a way that en: doesn't - will naturally have
>> different emphasis, there'll be different levels of coverage and
>> different approaches to fragmenting articles.
>>
>> Let's say, oh, [[History of Country]].
>>
>> In one language, this might be a single article. In another,
>> time-divided articles (overview; ancient history; history to 1500;
>> 1500 to 1900; modern history). In a third, it might be a thematic
>> divide (political history; religious history; military history;
>> overview).
>>
>> What combination of categories would work best for *all* of these pages?
>>
> So are you simply talking about coverage, then?
> 
> For those situations where we *don't* have an article on the same
> topic in multiple languages, we don't have an interwiki link, and we
> wouldn't link the categories.
> 
> The situations where we *do* have coverage in multiple languages, of
> the same articles and of the same categories, it doesn't make much
> sense not to share information.
> 
> I think the latter situation is much more widespread than the former.
> Not just people: people, places, events, years, fictional works,
> scientific concepts, etc.  Hitting random page a couple dozen times I
> don't see any articles which *shouldn't* exist across all language
> Wikipedias, and many of them already *do* exist across a number of
> them.
> 
> Jimbo and others have also made it clear that any cultural distinction
> between different language Wikipedias is accidental and in fact goes
> against the intention (this in the context of which languages should
> have a Wikipedia, but the idea carries here as well).  We don't have a
> British Encyclopedia and an American one, because we can both
> understand each other well enough to communicate.  If it were
> *possible* to automatically translate all articles into every language
> while keeping the content the same, we'd do so.  It just isn't, at
> least not with current technology.
> 
> OTOH, interwiki links already give us the automatic translation in
> terms of category information.  Yes, there will probably be some
> article titles and category titles which don't translate well, but
> that's the exception and for those few titles we wouldn't have any iw
> links anyway.

"United Kingdom" and related terms have presented a bit of a problem 
with the Vietnamese Wikipedia in the past. Whereas English has articles 
on "United Kingdom", "Great Britain", "England", etc., Vietnamese 
doesn't have terms that correlate 1:1. We have:

*"Vương quốc Liên hiệp Anh và Bắc Ireland" for "United Kingdom"

*Its shortened form, "Vương quốc Anh", which is literally translated 
"Kingdom of England" but is used to refer to the UK as a whole or to 
England, Wales, and Scotland

*"Đảo Anh" (Island of England) or "Đảo Britain" for the island of Great 
Britain

*"Anh" for England proper

We've oscillated between which interwiki links we apply to "Vương quốc 
Anh", for example; for now, it's linked to "Kingdom of Great Britain" at 
the English Wikipedia, meaning that all our UK-related articles have 
just one set of interwiki links for now. But that also means that our 
interwiki links aren't entirely accurate, and we have to note the 
differences in terminology in our articles, since the interwiki 
relations we've made don't reflect actual usage in Vietnamese.

-- 
Minh Nguyen <mxn at zoomtown.com>
AIM: trycom2000; Jabber: mxn at myjabber.net; Blog: http://mxn.f2o.org/