John and All,
As a possible complement to this discussion, CC-4 MIT OpenCourseWare-centric World University and School seeks to matriculate students in all ~200 countries' official/main languages ( https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/Languages), and may compensate them for work in a number of ways, including translation and developing machine translation (and in all 7,099 living languages eventually).
World Univ. and Sch. donated ourselves to Wikidata in 2015 for co-development, and got a new WUaS Miraheze Mediawiki last year in these regards too.
Cheers, Scott - https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/Nation_States (each to become a major online University for free CC-4 OCW degrees)
On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 1:49 PM, John Erling Blad jeblad@gmail.com wrote:
It is a long time since everyone on these projects were solely volunteers. :)
On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 PM, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, and then there's always the question. If he's getting paid, why
aren't
I? Why is he getting paid per word of article translated? Why am I not getting paid per spamvertisement deleted or vandal blocked? Why am I not getting paid for closing discussions that it takes hours of reading input and considering all sides and getting rocks thrown at me no matter what I do? Is that not valuable to the project as well?
If you want to pay anyone, you better start paying me. I'm okay with the idea of being a volunteer as long as everyone is a volunteer. But if you start paying some people and not me, we're going to have a problem.
Todd
On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 12:47 PM, Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Those who pay get to select what is translated. Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jean-Philippe Béland Sent: 24 February 2018 16:55 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation
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?
> > [1] > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_ > Wikipedia_should_have > [2] > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_ > Wikipedia_should_have/Expanded > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and > https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
,
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