[FM Discuss] Crowdsourcing the translation of web sites

[Edward Cherlin]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 12:51 PM, Andy Oram <andyo at oreilly.com> wrote:
> I think I mentioned some work of a friend (Brian McConnell) to Adam, but I'd like the list to know about it. He believes in people translating web sites as a volunteer activity. This is not bizarre (and I'm sure the readers of this list wouldn't think it bizarre), particularly because there's an underground worldwide movement of people adding subtitles to popular movies and distributing them.

Also lots of people localizing software, as you can see, for example,
at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Pootle. Community-base translation of
textbooks is a vital part of Earth Treasury's plan for rethinking
digital textbooks for one-to-one computing,

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Creating_textbooks

where we know ahead of time what software will be available to
incorporate into the materials. We intend to publish under Free
licenses, and we want to encourage teachers to assign such translation
work as homework for foreign-language and second-language (where
English or French is an official national language) students. I gave a
talk on the textbook project at SCaLE 7x (Southern California Linux
Expo) on Friday (video in the works), and I am working on an article
on the subject.

> Brian has created some Ajax-based tools to make it easy to translate a word, a sentence, etc.
>
> His main site is here:
>
> http://www.worldwidelexicon.com/
>
> He has a new project:
>
> http://www.dermundo.com/
>
> I'll include a request from him below.
>
> ----- Forwarded Message -----
> From: McConnell Brian <bsmcconnell at gmail.com>
> To: Oram Andy <andyo at oreilly.com>
>
> Andy,
>
> Quick heads up. I am posting a short piece on broadcast.oreilly.com,
> partly to mention Der Mundo, our new social translation hub for any
> site, but mainly to put a call out to developers who know the various
> content management systems. I want to build connectors to all of the
> major CMSs, and already have interfaces on our system, so if I can
> hook up with people who are, for example, expert in Drupal, we can
> quickly build extensions for these platforms.

We will need "translation memory" for reusing words and phrases
consistently, and other tools. Sil.org has some tools for their
translators and linguists (in more than 2,000 languages!).

> If you can pass this along and generally get the word out to anyone
> you think might be able to help I'd appreciate it. It will benefit a
> lot of people if we get this baked into most of the popular CMSs and
> blog hosts over the next month or so.
>
> Brian McConnell
> Worldwide Lexicon Project
> bsmcconnell at gmail.com
> bsmcconnell on skype
> http://www.worldwidelexicon.org
>
>
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>



-- 
Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
And Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai (Ed Cherlin)