[Wikimedia ZA] Translation of content into South African languages

[Achal Prabhala]

Dear Dwayne,

I've followed the work of translate.org.za and congrats on everything 
accomplished so far. Since you raised the issue of translation, I wanted 
to point you to a robust discussion that happened recently in India 
around Google's translation project. You can see archives of the 
conversation at: 
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2010-April/thread.html#682 
(Subj: Philosophical view on Google translated articles).

Reactions around google's translation have been mixed. The upsides are 
clear, and the downsides (as expressed in that conversation) were:
- a dissonance between volunteer editors' contributions and the translations
- a lack of necessity or specificity to some of the translated articles 
(marginal western figures who are unknown in, say, Tamil Nadu, etc.)
- some suspicion as to the motives behind the project (given google's 
involvement)
- some broader questions, in terms of volunteer vs 'paid' editing and 
what the spirit of editing Wikipedia is

In general, I think that translation, if cleverly applied in a 
customised way, could be useful, and when applied badly could be 
terrible - but, regardless, it's for the community to decide. Obviously, 
given the mission of translate.org.za, you would come with a degree of 
trust and acceptability that a corporation like google doesn't always 
necessarily bring (which is not to imply that their project is 
necessarily not helpful - at the moment, I believe various groups of 
Indian wikipedians are going ahead with talks and discussions on the 
trial). And when you talk about translation, have you had experience 
with written material that goes beyond interfaces and templates? (if you 
have, that experience might be useful to share). Also wondering if your 
goal is to build a tool (like google) that is constantly improved 
through human interaction and input, or to run the translation exercise 
as a collaborative, human-input-based exercise?

Perhaps a good way to think about this is to ask if a particular 
language community within the various South African wikipedias is 
interested in taking you up on this. And then run some kind of 
identification exercise - perhaps an ongoing project - where community 
members deposit articles they'd like to have translated from X language 
to Y language in a box. Articles from translation don't necessarily have 
to come from a strong Wikipedia (like English) or even an emerging 
Wikipedia like Afrikaans - they could well be within several smaller 
Wikipedias, eg Sotho to Zulu, etc. Finally, in terms of how things are 
translated, their quality, and style, I think this is where it is key to 
get community members involved to minimise conflicts and maximise 
usefulness of the end result.

Cheers,
Achal