Translations wiki

There is now an active translation wiki & betawiki. How are they related to this proposal?

Translation projects

New sites

translatewiki.net ‡ OmegaWiki ‡ Incubator

Meta projects

Babel - Babylon Translation requests

edit

This is a proposal for a new Wikimedia wiki. See also Interface translation wiki, Translation coordination group, Translation requests

Concept

The problem : Translations are becoming an increasingly important part of meta-coordination across the projects and languages in Wikimedia.

Case in point : the Meta-Wiki. A year ago (September 2004), when Translation requests was started, meta had almost no translation content. Translations were done on individual projects, by specific request (for press releases, for instance), and in an ad-hoc fashion. Today, around 30% of the 4500 pages on meta, and a significant portion of its templates, are devoted to translation. Recentchanges is sometimes overwhelmed by translators at work, hiding the other good policy and philosophical writing that takes place here, for which meta was originally intended.

Case in point : Recent attempts at multilingual websites. First the Wikimediafoundation site, then Wikimania, each with its own privacy concerns and restricted sets of editors. Both have failed to maintain accurate overviews of how up-to-date their translations are [or even which language is the original for a given page], or how many people are available to work on particular languages. Commons has fared better, with a completely open set of editors and broad notion of what it is meant to be; though it, too, leaves something to be desired in the way of truly multilingual policy and other pages.

Suggestion

The suggestion : A separate translation wiki, primarily for carrying out translations via MediaWiki (as we currently do).

• Each request and subpage at Translation requests could be converted to a link to a project page on the translation wiki. Most pages in the translation category could be migrated there and merged into policy and other pages.
• The current Translation requests page is quite limited -- it is just too crowded these days to be effective, and even its topical subpages for large projects like Wikimania and the Quarto have become unwieldy. There would be distinct pages for many kinds of translations; classified by origin, size, and purpose. (all of this could be done now on meta, but again would distract from the other uses of this wiki)
• Any content found on that wiki would be for translation purposes. Translators could go there to pick up their translation-related talk-page messages; everyone would have full babel information about themselves; translators could peek into the recentchanges for the site to see what broad translations were ongoing across the projects.
• The wiki could be a testbed for translation-specific interface and database enhancements (again, something that could be done here on meta, but would be less troublesome and more focused on a dedicated project)
  • In particular, it could perhaps be used to improve the current scheme for translating the Wikimedia-project interface strings (and likewise the default MediaWiki strings). See Interface translations wiki for a related, more specific proposal.

The name : (suggestions wanted)

• translation.wikimedia.org
• l10n.wikimedia.org

  Localization ("l10n") is more general than translation, including modifying images, text, and tone for various audiences. This might be more appropriate if the site were also used to handle variations of documents (for different audiences) within a single language.

Discussion

formerly at Translation Wiki

TradWiki/WikiTran (WikipediaTranslator/WikiTranslator/BabelWiki) is a wiki that will be coded to help wikipedians translate articles from English to other languages.

• I rather like WikiTran myself. --Stephen Gilbert

I prefer Wikibabel, in a similar way to WIKIpedia, WIKIspecies and so on.

How about Wikitongues? - FrancisTyers 21:21, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

I like Wikibabel. --77.209.10.184 15:55, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

All code and data should be released under a free licence (GPL for code, GFDL for text).

Advantages

• faster translation of wikipedia
• generation of large amounts of useful data (corpora).
• creation of a useful tool

TradWiki/WikiTran - Translation memory approach

A Translation Memory is a computer program that uses a database of old translations to help a human translator. If this approach is followed, WikipediaTranslator will need the following features:

• visualization of translated and original versions
• split of original versions on several parts for individual translation

Lexical, syntactic and semantic analysis of wikipedia content

The first step for wikipedia translation is the analysis of wikipedia's content. This analysis will determine:

• Number of words and sentences
• Words distribution
• Frequency of the most popular sentences and expressions
• Semantic relations between words and between sentences
• Syntactic analysis of all sentences

It would be interesting the user could click on every word in an article to link to the wiktionary definition, if there is not an inside wikipedia article. And indicate to the software to translate the word into another language ( using the right mouse clicking).

Information about the most popular sentences and expressions can be used to create a translation database of such expressions so translators don't need to repeat a translation.

Yes, a database of idioms

You mean like a w:translation memory system?

Wiktionary

We can use an improved Wiktionary (i.e. associative Wiktionary). Wiktionary need a big improvement, but in this way we don´t begin from zero.See Category:Wiktionary--77.209.10.184 15:47, 4 March 2007 (UTC)