My reply can be read as a bit more harsh than intended, it was merely a statement about my present experience about translators in general.
The problem with lack of contributors (and translators) in a specialized area is that there is a small community, and within this community some kind of selection is made. Each time a selection is repeated the remaining group shrinks. Specialize the selection sufficiently many times and there will be no contributors (or translators) left. It is simply a game of probabilities. Thus, to make such a project work it must have a sufficiently broad scope for the articles. Articles about public health services will probably work even for a pretty small language group, but specialized medical articles might create a problem. But then you find a retired orthopedic surgeon like Subas Chandra Rout…
On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 4:04 PM, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
I agree with John that it is very difficult to turn a translator into a new editor. I also agree with Jean-Philippe that it is key to have involvement of the local projects and preferable if they lead the efforts. Of the languages we worked in only one explicitly requested not to be involved / have translations from TWB.
James
On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 7:59 AM, John Erling Blad jeblad@gmail.com wrote:
You can turn it around; give added credits for translations from small language projects and into the larger ones, that is a lot more
interesting
than strictly translating from the larger language projects.
On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:55 PM, Jean-Philippe Béland < jpbeland@wikimedia.ca
wrote:
I think the request for such projects should come from the concerned language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my simple opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
Jean-Philippe Béland Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad jeblad@gmail.com
wrote:
Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less
interesting
in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad idea, the translators should be able to chose for themselves. Articles should
also
be
pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie vertical
articles,
as the number of editors that can handle those will be pretty small.
In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new
editor!
You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.
On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad jeblad@gmail.com wrote:
- You must start with high quality content and thus all articles
are
extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the
project.
- The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
more
efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see
that
tool
improved further such as having it support specific lists of
articles
that
are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also
love
the
tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
Didn't mention ContentTranslation, but it should be pretty obvious.
- We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages
in
which their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian
there
is often already at least some content on many of the topics in
question.
The
issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia.
And
for
languages in which we have little content there are often few
avaliable
volunteers.
I used projects below 65k articles as an example, as the chance of competing articles are pretty low.
- With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would
require
significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the
work
seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so
languages
in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a
second
review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be accepted.
I'n my original email I wrote "verified good translators". It is as simple as "Has the editor contributed other articles at the
project?"
On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 2:26 PM, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com
wrote:
We learned a few things during the medical translation project
which
started back in 2011:
- You must start with high quality content and thus all articles
are
extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
- A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN
WP.
Thus
we moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the leads
of
the
English articles.
- The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made
efforts
more
efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see
that
tool
improved further such as having it support specific lists of
articles
that
are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also
love
the
tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
- We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our
partner
Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages
in
which their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian
there
is often already at least some content on many of the topics in
question.
The
issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia.
And
for
languages in which we have little content there are often few
avaliable
volunteers.
- With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would
require
significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the
work
seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so
languages
in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a
second
review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be accepted.
- I hired a coordinator for the translation project for a couple
of
years. The translators at TWB did not want to become Wikipedians or learn
how
to
use our systems. The coordinator created account like TransSW001
(one
for
each volunteer) and preloaded the article to be translated into
Content
Translation. They than gave the volunteer translator the user name
and
password to the account.
- Were are we at now? There are currently just over 1,000 leads
of
articles that have been improved and are ready for translation.
This
includes articles on the 440 medications that are on the WHO
Essential
List. We have worked a bit in some 100 languages. The efforts have resulted in more than 5 million works translated and integrated into
different
Wikipedias. The coordinator has unfortunately moved on to his real
job
of
teaching high school students.
- The project continues but at a slower pace than before. The
Wikipedian
and retired orthopedic surgeon Subas Chandra Rout has basically
single
handedly translated nearly all 1,000 leads into Odia a language
spoken
by
40 million people in Eastern India. The amazing thing is that for
many
of
these topics this is the first and only information online about
it.
Google translate does not even claim to work in this language. Our
partnerships
with WMTW and medical school in Taipai continue to translate into
Chinese.
There the students translate and than their translations are
reviewed
by
their profs before being posted. They translate in groups using
hackpad
to
make it more social.
I am currently working to re invigorate the project :-) James
On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 5:51 AM, John Erling Blad <
jeblad@gmail.com
wrote:
> This discussion is going to be fun! =D > > A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles, > the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small. > > What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators?
There
are > several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand
articles
from
> "List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the
ten
thousand > articles from the expanded list[2]. > > Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word
(about
$1 > for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into
another
> language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in
high-cost
> countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages
that
lacks
> good translation tools. > > I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the
communities,
as
> without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community at > all. By not paying for new articles, and only translating well-referenced > articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be
avoided.
Perhaps > we should also identify good source articles, that would be a
help.
> Translated articles should be above some minimum size, but they
does
not
> have to be full translations of the source article. > > A real problem is that our existing lists of good articles other projects > should have is pretty much biased towards Western World, so they
need
a
lot > of adjustments. Perhaps such a project would identify our
inherit
bias?
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