Refining and mapping use cases

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Some questions to ask when thinking about a translation strategy:

  • Is your content dynamic or static?
  • Is it chronological (blog), version (wiki), or real time (chat) translation
  • How many translators?
  • Paid or volunteer?
  • Level of experience?
  • Collaborative or segmented?
  • Is their an editor/proofreader/manager?
  • Is there a rolling deadline or specific deadline?
  • How many languages are you translating from?
  • How many languages are you translating to?
  • What is the source and target text encoding?
  • How many scripts? (arabic, cyrillic,
  • What media format are you translating to/from?
  • What file type are you translating to/from?
  • Does your target medium support your target language? (ie. lack of Flash support for right to left text)
  • Do you want it to be 'good enough' or does it need to be professional? (ie. medical text)
  • Does machine translation exist in your source/target language?
  • Do you need a human eye on machine translations?

Use case #1:

At an English-speaking conference, a Japanese speaker translates the presentation in real-time on an IRC channel from English to Japanese and from audio to text.

Best practices:

  • Transcribe the presentation in English (original language) and feed it into machine translation
  • Record presentation using video.
  • Log the IRC chat with specific time stamps. Then use that log and feed it into dotSUB so there is a translated video of the presentation.

Shortcomings:

  • There isn't interaction between the various IRC channels (ie. the Arabic IRC channel and the Japanese IRC channel)

Use case #2:

Allow readers of a translation to:

1.) make comments about the translation and suggest alternatives 2.) ask the author and translator of the text what the intended meaning is 3.) provide regional variations for specific words and or sentences

Best practices:

  • Create your texts on a wiki which allows for:

1.) discussion

2.) versioning (each translation is marked by translator and time)

3.) easily duplicated text for regional variations

Shortcomings:

  • A wiki isn't well suited for discussion for a particular word or sentence. For example, in a medical textbook you could have a long discussion about a particular word.

Use case #3:

  • A documentation effort produced by three separate organizations, translated into 10 different languages, and published in various media formats (CD-ROM, USB thumb drives, WordPress, Drupal, PDF, Open Office).

Needs/Shortcomings:

  • Localization of the wiki software
  • A wiki plugin which shows what percentage of a translation is done. (Project management.)
  • Better project management tools to delegate who does what from each organization.
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