[Translators-l] Wikimania scholarships

[Desilets, Alain]

> On 26/03/2008, Casey Brown <cbrown1023.ml at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hello all!
> >
> >  This is a slight poke, ;-) it seems it has been about a week since
> >  Mark sent this e-mail and we have translations in only es, fr, and
> >  zh-hans; thanks to those who translated those!
> 
> Hm IANAT (I am not a translator), but maybe you should wait until
> pages are complete before asking for translations. The dates, and the
> application form, the two most important parts, are not available yet.
> What is the point of translating something that is near useless in its
> current form? Better to wait for the complete document first, I would
> guess.

This is the way that translation is done in traditional environments. Documents are first written in a master language (usually English), and only when this master version reaches a "final" stage will translation proceed.

However, this is not a very wiki-way of doing things. One of the strengths of wiki is that it allows small early drafts of documents to be published very early, and allow the community to grow and improve it in an organic fashion.

I agree though that given current translation support in wiki engines like MediaWiki, the traditional way may be more appropriate. One of my carreer goals right now is to change that and figure out what tools and processes might allow translation in a more organic wiki-way:

"Translation the Wiki Way":
   http://www.wikisym.org/ws2006/proceedings/p19.pdf

I'm happy to report that we are not far from this in my opinion. For example, the TikiWiki community is currently implementing features to support this sort of thing, and the Mozilla Foundation is seriously considering using those features to enable the collaborative authoring and translation of the Firefox documentation in multiple languages:

http://www.wiki-translation.com/Cross+Lingual+Wiki+Engine+Project&bl=y


Sorry if this sounds like a plug, but I couldn't resist.



----
Alain Désilets, MASc 
Agent de recherches/Research Officer 
Institut de technologie de l'information du CNRC / 
NRC Institute for Information Technology 

alain.desilets at nrc-cnrc.gc.ca 
Tél/Tel (613) 990-2813 
Facsimile/télécopieur: (613) 952-7151 

Conseil national de recherches Canada, M50, 1200 chemin Montréal, 
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