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Transparent Translations

Posted by Lorraine Chuen 1110.20SC on March 06, 2017

We are looking to develop a FLOSS translation tool that allows us to collaboratively translate OER and other documents paragraph-by-paragraph with the possibility of editing and reviewing each translated section before approving it. This would benefit platforms like GitBook, Wikipedia and more as well.  

The tool could be centrally hosted or deployed on private servers as needed. A responsive UI with the possibility of making word-by-word suggestions would allow reviewing even on mobile devices. There exist tools for i18n but they don't really suit document translations.

What kinds of help are we looking for? 

I mainly need help on the software and design ends of things as I'm not a programmer or designer myself. I'm fairly familiar with git and GitHub/GitLab and can help coördinate the project on either of those platforms. We should ideally have an open designing session where we identify issues faced with translating and then reviewing longer documents collaboratively.

Note: At the moment, a friend and I are working on translating an old (out-of-copyright) Finnish book, and we're doing it using Google Docs: when my friend adds a new FI-to-EN paragraph, I copy the original FI paragraph and add it as a comment to the EN one, so we can discuss the paragraph as comments to the comment. But this flow isn't ideal and not very visually appealing.

 

We are looking for people with skills in: 

  • Graphic Design
  • Software Development
  • Community / Grassroots Organizing

Can you be based remotely to help? Yes! Can collaborate from anywhere in the world.

Who do I get in touch with if I want to help out?  If you have questions or are interested in helping out, you can contact Achintya Rao at [email protected] 

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      • Naomi Penfold
        Naomi Penfold commented 2017-03-15 11:13:42 -0400
        Achintya, I love this idea.

        I wonder if there’s a possibility to build a tool based on hypothes.is, or at least the OpenAnnotations standard, so that any online text can be translated by the community. What would be needed is a way to approve translations (say, by paragraph) much like StackOverflow. The I,Annotate conference and hack day in San Fran this May could be a good opportunity to float this idea. More at http://iannotate.org/. Is anyone here going?

        There is a cool new tool from MIT Media Lab, Wikum, that may help with raising the most useful contributions to the top: https://phys.org/news/2017-03-readers-summaries-online-discussions.html

        It would be awesome if this idea could be applied to the scientific literature too.

        — Naomi
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