Communications committee/Subcommittees/Translation

The translation committee is a volunteer committee that helps out with all aspects of translation.

Overview

Tasks

(needs updating)

The committee's tasks on Meta include:

Assisting WMF and chapter staff, as well as community members, with technical help to put up translation requests when needed.
Ensuring the quality and clarity of the texts that are to be translated.
Notifying translators about new requests, and assisting with whatever questions and concerns translators may have.
Migrating old translatable pages and other translations to the new system using the Translate extension.

The committee, in working for these tasks, joins all the Meta-Wiki translation administrators and other users, serving as a recognizable point of contact.

The general committee's tasks, from which the above tasks are derived (as Meta is the main place for its action) are the following:

Community: recommending ways to support our translator network, for everything from communication to outreach to article writing; organizing and offering language training, software, support.
Process: auditing how we submit / track translations and translation requests, on meta and elsewhere.
Oversight: coordinating different sources for translations, from community groups and ambassadors to the occasional bulk donation or rush contract.
Technical: advising on priorities for translation tools, multilingual usability, and related bugs/requests.

Membership

The committee is open to new members. If you are interested in joining it, you can send an e-mail to the committee list at transcomlists.wikimedia.org, and your application will be considered by all other members.

Members

Username	Location	Languages spoken	Notes
Aphaia (talk · contribs)	Japan	ja-N, en-3, de-2, fr-1, it-1	Inactive
Az1568 (talk · contribs)	United States	en-N	Transcom Committee contact & transcom listadmin
Cbrown1023 (talk · contribs)	United States	en-N, es-2, zh-1	Inactive
Htchien (talk · contribs)	Taiwan	zh-N, en-2	Inactive
Jon Harald Søby (talk · contribs)	Norway	nb-N, en-4, nn-3, sv-3, da-2, de-2, sw-2, eo-1, es-1, ro-1	Inactive
Jseddon (WMF) (talk · contribs)	United Kingdom	en-N	Inactive
Nemo_bis (talk · contribs)	Italy	it-N, en-2	Inactive
Tbayer (WMF) (talk · contribs)	United States	de-N, en-3, es-2, fr-2	Inactive
Thehelpfulone (talk · contribs)	United Kingdom	en-N, es-2, fr-1	Inactive
Yuyu (talk · contribs)	Hong Kong	en-N, yue-N, zh-N, fr-2, de-2	Inactive

Communication

There are several ways to get in touch with translation committee members and other translators.

Translator signup – Announcements about new translations are made via this tool, which sends notifications to relevant users based on what languages a translation is needed into.
Mailing list: translators-l@lists.wikimedia.org is the main discussion venue, dedicated to general discussion on translation in Wikimedia projects. Not limited to matters that the translation subcommittee directly manages. You are invited, for example, to submit your translation request which you may want to send to several other Wikimedia mailing lists.
#wikimedia-translation^connect – An IRC channel to chat with other translators and translation committee members.
Meta talk:Babylon – The talk page of the translation portal on Meta. (needs complete overhaul)
You may contact Transcom by mail; our address is transcomlists.wikimedia.org (as of 2012, this list also has as members a dozen of non-committee observers). Individual members are also contactable via email. (See #Members).

Resources

Meta:Translate extension
mw:Help:Extension:Translate and subpages
mw:Extension:TranslationNotification
- Special:TranslatorSignup
- Special:NotifyTranslators (translation administrators only)
Partners
- Translation coordinators per language
- Translation teams

Pages that need migration to the translate extension or archiving

Background

The translation subcommittee is a subcommittee of Communications committee, responsible for the translation of Wikimedia Foundation information, to make it available in multiple languages. It was originally founded as promotion & translation subcommittee in early 2006, and separated in August 2006.

The translation subcommittee also dealt with translation-related inquiries in the OTRS translation queue.

There are over 270 languages supported by the Wikimedia Foundation in some way. The translation of key announcements must cover a core set of languages (see below) and should cover many of the other languages, according to some general scheme of prioritization. Translation of promotional material depends on cultural and other context, but is expected to follow broadly the same priorities.

The subcommittee, as of 2012, is in the process of being revamped and expanded.

Suggestions and ideas

Suggestions of tools and methodologies for translation, and pointers to existing projects to organize and coordinate translations, go here. Old outdated proposals are moved to the Archive while those which still hold some value are kept and edited here, open for discussion.

Core set of languages

See subpage.

Organisation

See also Managing translations

You will need two kind of expertises: 1) translations and 2) people to find translators everywhere. -- Oscar

Tree structure of translation staff: The organisation of all these languages would be pyramidical; no one can do all works necessary hence we would like to find a way helpful to work together. See also translation coordinators per language: the community of translators in each language should only care about translation by self-managing translation guidelines and working together by a consensus model.
Set priorities: there need to be different levels of urgency and we should try to give deadlines: that makes it easier for people to decide to do a translation or not.
Information of translators: Babel templates and language combinations (Transbabel). Babel and Transbabel templates provide information on who works in which language(s) with categories generated thanks to those templates. See also Special:SupportedLanguages. Organisation work is going, and it will be easier to find help.
How should membership of the committee work? Should it still function as a committee, or should membership be even more open (akin to the Bot Approvals Group on the English Wikipedia)? Personally I would prefer a more open format. Anyone interested in joining the committee should be allowed to do so if they have translation experience and are keen to help. Jon Harald Søby (talk) 15:27, 30 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]