Content brainstorm

From My Wiki

OTT07 Content Summary

2007-12-01 14:35

"Needs" and ideas

Corpora Commons - aggregating translation memories for everyone to benefit from. We need a good collaborative system of dictionaries. We have different free dicitonary formats, none of them seem to be really good, and today on the iCommons list someone annouced a project to do this.

Stan: Making things open is often not that objectionable but it need to have a incentive, and translation is a big incentive to make things open. Also, translators commons: translatorcommons.no where you go for style guides and metastyle guides and a discussion forum for translations for that region, and a head site where different problems can filter out to the individuals.

Alice: Working collaboratively, to incentivise access to paid work. This was Gorans idea, there are all these volunteer translator communities springing up, and they might want to do their pet interest for fun, but to get paid for doing other kinds of translation. Some kind of certification-style quality bading, karma systems, would be good to enable this.

Jerzy: All people who do voluntary stuff, can have their contributions noted on a central reputation place, and its searchable.

david: how does this work in the free software programmer world?

michelle: advogato was very similar to this, a reputation system.

Anas: sourceforge is like that

Andy: facebook and linkedin are more similar than sourceforge, but we're talking about a worldwide reputation net

Elad: Its morelike the W3C, a "open translation consortium" where standards are put together.

Michelle: so some kind of organisatoin with an ongoing structure to move things forward?

Elad: It should be somehwat structured, drafitng things up into final pieces, not just a mess on a wiki .

Alice: the profile idea says that a reward is the work,and the work forms a resume kind of testament. someone is making a platform with both the paid work and the volunteer community, and they asked if they could recommend aspiring professional freelance translators to use global voices as a resume builder. so i know a project thats working like that, and if we could do something like that ourselves, that would be great.

David: we need a map of the volunteer communities out there. content translation is a very small worldwide thing, UI communities are much larger.

Stan: Wikipedia has a hybrid thing because their is half translation and half original writing.

Alice: Poeple translate for Global Voices because they are tired of the image of their country in the mainstream media. We asked if cash or non-cash incentives would help, and we asked what motivates people to start in the first place, is how we knew that. And the non-cash incentives were to bring people to gether in our annual conference, an pure opportunity to travel is in itself a big incentive. The lifespan of a GV translator is about a year.

Alex: when people feel irritated about things, they speak up, and its like a 'pearl effect'

Alice: Often populations who have high literacy. Certain countries just have elites online and most people not online.

Elad: In Israel, we got communcations students to help educate people. We recuited them because it was academic points for them.

Alice: There are universities working with global voices who use us as student projects. so having a place for universities and volunteer communities to meet would be great too. A volunteer-to-paid-work people were bringing in universities to do this work.

Anas: we need an email list that sends to email lists, so we can contact lots of people in lots of differnet communities.

Stan: for global voices it would be good to have a "for teachers" page that explains how to use the site and the community in a school. students having their work posted is really fun for students, because its real. and google and amazon do this, they have pages that explain how classrooms can use their services.

Elad: Open education iniative of CC, ccLearn, and this could be expanded to work on this kind of thing.

Alice: Networks of volunteers merge into organistaional networks, like universities.

?: FLOSS manuals try to link to versions in all languages; often very similar manuals are made in different languages.

Daniela: It would be useful to have "if you translated this you might like to ranslate these related texts"

Dan: I think its good to focus on the needs of actual trnslators.

Linde: So here is the list now, what are the immediate first steps?

• Corpora Commons. Combine/Collect dictionaries, style guides, best practice guidelines (eg, licensing), use cases, regional translator forums. A wiki as a collection point is a good start.
• A portal for translators. This needs to start with an assessment of the needs an the frameworks that are appropriate to build it on.
• Use translation as a carrot to incentivise free culture
• social networking platform for translators, which can become a window to paid work
• mapping translation communities, and setting up a consortium/body/organistation. first step is to list the mailing lists of the communities.
• linking with existing organistaions, like univerisites, which can involve helping people train with real translatoin work and building peoples employability
• putting together a resource for education professionals that explains how they can run a classroom project that uses online resources
• some kind of peer filter for translation-related searches, to help you find the result that is what you want except its in a different language to the one you started with.

15:25