[Wikimedia-l] Translation of documents [was: Request for consultation on proposed guidelines relating to potential conflicts of interest in requesting Wikimedia resources]

[Samuel Klein]

On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 11:02 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo)
<nemowiki at gmail.com>wrote:

> Christophe Henner, 21/12/2012 16:43:
>
>  Well, feels weird to see french as 1st priority frankly.
>>
>
> That's an old proposal meant to start a discussion, it gives some criteria.


That was based on primary/secondary language users and activity of
community, from a few years ago.  Chinese, French, and Spanish do still
seem to open up access to the largest communities of people around the
world when one considers [second-language readers who don't read English as
a first/second language].

Other suggestions welcome, of course.


> I don't see the point of the proposal. I'm quite sure people are able to
> use Google Translate themselves, and the Translate extension already
> provides machine translation features. <http://laxstrom.name/blag/**
> 2012/09/07/translation-memory-**all-wikimedia-wikis/<http://laxstrom.name/blag/2012/09/07/translation-memory-all-wikimedia-wikis/>
> >
> Not to mention that /reading/ a document is not enough to actively engage
> in (the discussion about) it, someone should be listening...


Right.  Starting with a good human translation of a thumbnail summary, no
longer than a paragraph, is a useful standard that lot of multilingual
communities / processes use.

Then readers can know whether they should start reading the full document,
and discussing it in theiir language; others who don't want to read a poor
translation but do want to discuss the topic can engage without themselves
reading the whole thing.  This scales fairly well as long as 1-2 people are
willing to read in detail or know one of the languages into which the whole
has been thoroughly translated.

SJ

PS - Every time a topic like this comes up recently, I think about how
*totally wonderful*
the recent improvements in the translation toolchain we use are and make
translation by our community vastly easier than ie was even a year ago.  We
no longer have to think in terms of using Google Translate; we can start to
build our own translation memory -- or more than one in focused topic
areas.