[Translators-l] What to do with outdated translated pages?

habj sweetadelaide at gmail.com
Sat Dec 23 10:20:21 UTC 2006


I have just started to look into the translation requests. I wonder a
couple of things, and I bring it to the list since I am sure there
must be plenty other translators in similar situations.

The pages for the current fundraiser will only be used for a couple of
weeks, but many other pages remain for a long time. Those pages
generally get changed and updated as reality changes. In the current
translation requests, there is for example the page on the Board, and
on the current staff. In both cases, new people will come and others
will leave. If a page like this is translated and not updated, it
looks very bad. Old or wrong information is often worse than no
information at all, and in this case outdated translated info will
prevent people to instead visit the corresponding page in a language
where the info is correct.

If I translate a page, I can not promise to be here to update it
later. If my local community was bigger - and/or more generally
interested in stuff above the local community level - I could count on
other people replacing me, but as things are now I can that is
something I can hope for but not count on. If we don't implement some
kind of system to deal with outdated pages, I am a little afraid of
translating such pages. I feel that in the end I might have done more
bad than good.

How can we deal with outdated translations? One _could_ tag a
translated page saying which version of another page it is translated
from. Others who don't speak the language in question can then decide
whether the information is too outdated to be around, and somehow
remove the page - I suppose redirecting it to the English, or other
suitable, version is a working idea. Does anyone have a better
suggestion?

/habj



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