Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[Vi to]

Cultural appropriation is something different, by "forcing" the contents in
a minority language we would actually be at risk of implementing a form of
"cultural colonialism" which is the opposite of a cultural appropriation.

NOTE: I refer to "the Western" in both cultural and "Wikipedian" sense: I
mean cultures with a strong presence on the web plus developed and
flourishing Wikipedia communities.

Helping minority languages with funds/workforce is not bad in my opinion,
but I think a bottom-up process must be followed, with the "bottom" being
as closer as possible to relevant linguistic/cultural communities. A
Wikipedia full of "what the Westerns think is important" in a minority
non-Western language would definitely fail project scopes.

This kind of problem almost does not arise with minority language
associated to Western cultures since they share the same cultural
backgrounds: back to my previous example the cultural background of
Sicilian is substantially equal to Italian one. Still, as I already wrote,
wikis in minority languages should focus on a certain aspect of wiki scope:
Wiki has roughly two main scopes: 1) sharing knowledge in a certain
language 2) also preserving the cultural heritage associated with different
languages. For languages mainly spoken as first language the "sharing
knowledge" aspect is predominant, while the second should take precedence
in languages whose speakers are native speakers of a "bigger" language.

Vito

2018-02-24 22:58 GMT+01:00 John Erling Blad :

> Seems like this is mostly about cultural ownership and appropriation. Not
> sure if it is possible to agree on this.
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 6:08 PM, Vi to  wrote:
>
> > I'll reply to the most recent email just for laziness.
> >
> > I'm doubtful for a series of reasons, most of were already expressed in a
> > better way by others:
> > *a remuneration in terms of quantity will weaken the quality of
> > translations unless there's a strong mechanism of quality verification
> > requiring a quantity of resources comparable to translations themselves;
> > *articles are the result of a long process which reflects cultural
> identity
> > of different communities, I'm not confident with transferring them to a
> > different "weaker" cultures. My usage of "weaker" adjective only focuses
> > about the strength of a cultural presence on the Internet;
> > *articles to be translated are at high risk of reflecting the cultural
> > identity (and biases) of the Western culture;
> > *finally I think paid translators would hardly turn into stable
> > Wikipedians.
> >
> > IMHO some paid editing may be better exploited in order to digitalise
> texts
> > of unrepresented cultures (wikisource) or preserving their vocabularies
> > (wiktionary).
> >
> > Also those languages which are secondary for all their speakers should be
> > dealt with in a different fashion. I, for one, am a native speaker of
> > specific variant of Sicilian, Sicilian is a secondary language to any of
> > its speakers. Honestly, I'd find pointless to read the biography of
> > Leonardo da Vinci in Sicilian while I can find thousands of books about
> him
> > in Italian. Also I find this kind of translation creates a fake
> "literary"
> > language totally detached from reality: there's no "encaustic painting"
> in
> > Sicilian, still a Sicilian article about Leonardo will invent one.
> >
> > As a general principle we should always collect, rather than create,
> > knowledge.
> >
> > Vito
> >
> > 2018-02-24 16:30 GMT+01:00 John Erling Blad :
> >
> > > My reply can be read as a bit more harsh than intended, it was merely a
> > > statement about my present experience about translators in general.
> > >
> > > The problem with lack of contributors (and translators) in a
> specialized
> > > area is that there is a small community, and within this community some
> > > kind of selection is made. Each time a selection is repeated the
> > remaining
> > > group shrinks. Specialize the selection sufficiently many times and
> there
> > > will be no contributors (or translators) left. It is simply a game of
> > > probabilities. Thus, to make such a project work it must have a
> > > sufficiently broad scope for the articles. Articles about public health
> > > services will probably work even for a pretty small language group, but
> > > specialized medical articles might create a problem. But then you find
> > > a retired
> > > orthopedic surgeon like Subas Chandra Rout…
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 4:04 PM, James Heilman 
> wrote:
> > >
> > > > I agree with John that it is very difficult to turn a translator
> into a
> > > new
> > > > editor. I also agree with Jean-Philippe that it is key to have
> > > involvement
> > > > of the local projects and preferable if they lead the efforts. Of the
> > > > languages we worked in only one explicitly requested not to be
> > involved /
> > > > have translations 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[Jean-Philippe Béland]

I agree with the last part of Vito's message. For languages where '''all'''
the speakers speak another lingua franca, I think such process does not
have real value. The speakers will always go read in the bigger language
because the article is most likely to be better. The advantages of having
their own Wikipedia is to be able to express knowledge in their own way
according to their own culture.

Jean-Philippe Béland
Vice President, Wikimedia Canada

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 12:09 PM Vi to  wrote:

> I'll reply to the most recent email just for laziness.
>
> I'm doubtful for a series of reasons, most of were already expressed in a
> better way by others:
> *a remuneration in terms of quantity will weaken the quality of
> translations unless there's a strong mechanism of quality verification
> requiring a quantity of resources comparable to translations themselves;
> *articles are the result of a long process which reflects cultural identity
> of different communities, I'm not confident with transferring them to a
> different "weaker" cultures. My usage of "weaker" adjective only focuses
> about the strength of a cultural presence on the Internet;
> *articles to be translated are at high risk of reflecting the cultural
> identity (and biases) of the Western culture;
> *finally I think paid translators would hardly turn into stable
> Wikipedians.
>
> IMHO some paid editing may be better exploited in order to digitalise texts
> of unrepresented cultures (wikisource) or preserving their vocabularies
> (wiktionary).
>
> Also those languages which are secondary for all their speakers should be
> dealt with in a different fashion. I, for one, am a native speaker of
> specific variant of Sicilian, Sicilian is a secondary language to any of
> its speakers. Honestly, I'd find pointless to read the biography of
> Leonardo da Vinci in Sicilian while I can find thousands of books about him
> in Italian. Also I find this kind of translation creates a fake "literary"
> language totally detached from reality: there's no "encaustic painting" in
> Sicilian, still a Sicilian article about Leonardo will invent one.
>
> As a general principle we should always collect, rather than create,
> knowledge.
>
> Vito
>
> 2018-02-24 16:30 GMT+01:00 John Erling Blad :
>
> > My reply can be read as a bit more harsh than intended, it was merely a
> > statement about my present experience about translators in general.
> >
> > The problem with lack of contributors (and translators) in a specialized
> > area is that there is a small community, and within this community some
> > kind of selection is made. Each time a selection is repeated the
> remaining
> > group shrinks. Specialize the selection sufficiently many times and there
> > will be no contributors (or translators) left. It is simply a game of
> > probabilities. Thus, to make such a project work it must have a
> > sufficiently broad scope for the articles. Articles about public health
> > services will probably work even for a pretty small language group, but
> > specialized medical articles might create a problem. But then you find
> > a retired
> > orthopedic surgeon like Subas Chandra Rout…
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 4:04 PM, James Heilman  wrote:
> >
> > > I agree with John that it is very difficult to turn a translator into a
> > new
> > > editor. I also agree with Jean-Philippe that it is key to have
> > involvement
> > > of the local projects and preferable if they lead the efforts. Of the
> > > languages we worked in only one explicitly requested not to be
> involved /
> > > have translations from TWB.
> > >
> > > James
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 7:59 AM, John Erling Blad 
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > You can turn it around; give added credits for translations from
> small
> > > > language projects and into the larger ones, that is a lot more
> > > interesting
> > > > than strictly translating from the larger language projects.
> > > >
> > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:55 PM, Jean-Philippe Béland <
> > > > jpbel...@wikimedia.ca
> > > > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > I think the request for such projects should come from the
> concerned
> > > > > language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my
> > simple
> > > > > opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
> > > > >
> > > > > Jean-Philippe Béland
> > > > > Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad  >
> > > > wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less
> > > > interesting
> > > > > > in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad idea, the
> > > > > > translators should be able to chose for themselves. Articles
> should
> > > > also
> > > > > be
> > > > > > pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie vertical
> > > > articles,
> > > > > > as the number of editors that can 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[Michael Snow]

On 2/24/2018 1:53 PM, John Erling Blad wrote:

The source article should meet certain standards, but do not fall in the
trap where the translated articles must themselves be better than some
imagined standard. That would lead to a defunc process.
I'm not saying a translated article must be flawless. But certainly if 
we were paying for translations, it would be appropriate to have some 
level of expectations for the quality of the result. With volunteers, 
any honest effort is encouraged, although if the quality is low enough 
to be worse than the alternative, they can be encouraged to redirect 
that effort more productively.


--Michael Snow

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

Seems like this is mostly about cultural ownership and appropriation. Not
sure if it is possible to agree on this.

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 6:08 PM, Vi to  wrote:

> I'll reply to the most recent email just for laziness.
>
> I'm doubtful for a series of reasons, most of were already expressed in a
> better way by others:
> *a remuneration in terms of quantity will weaken the quality of
> translations unless there's a strong mechanism of quality verification
> requiring a quantity of resources comparable to translations themselves;
> *articles are the result of a long process which reflects cultural identity
> of different communities, I'm not confident with transferring them to a
> different "weaker" cultures. My usage of "weaker" adjective only focuses
> about the strength of a cultural presence on the Internet;
> *articles to be translated are at high risk of reflecting the cultural
> identity (and biases) of the Western culture;
> *finally I think paid translators would hardly turn into stable
> Wikipedians.
>
> IMHO some paid editing may be better exploited in order to digitalise texts
> of unrepresented cultures (wikisource) or preserving their vocabularies
> (wiktionary).
>
> Also those languages which are secondary for all their speakers should be
> dealt with in a different fashion. I, for one, am a native speaker of
> specific variant of Sicilian, Sicilian is a secondary language to any of
> its speakers. Honestly, I'd find pointless to read the biography of
> Leonardo da Vinci in Sicilian while I can find thousands of books about him
> in Italian. Also I find this kind of translation creates a fake "literary"
> language totally detached from reality: there's no "encaustic painting" in
> Sicilian, still a Sicilian article about Leonardo will invent one.
>
> As a general principle we should always collect, rather than create,
> knowledge.
>
> Vito
>
> 2018-02-24 16:30 GMT+01:00 John Erling Blad :
>
> > My reply can be read as a bit more harsh than intended, it was merely a
> > statement about my present experience about translators in general.
> >
> > The problem with lack of contributors (and translators) in a specialized
> > area is that there is a small community, and within this community some
> > kind of selection is made. Each time a selection is repeated the
> remaining
> > group shrinks. Specialize the selection sufficiently many times and there
> > will be no contributors (or translators) left. It is simply a game of
> > probabilities. Thus, to make such a project work it must have a
> > sufficiently broad scope for the articles. Articles about public health
> > services will probably work even for a pretty small language group, but
> > specialized medical articles might create a problem. But then you find
> > a retired
> > orthopedic surgeon like Subas Chandra Rout…
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 4:04 PM, James Heilman  wrote:
> >
> > > I agree with John that it is very difficult to turn a translator into a
> > new
> > > editor. I also agree with Jean-Philippe that it is key to have
> > involvement
> > > of the local projects and preferable if they lead the efforts. Of the
> > > languages we worked in only one explicitly requested not to be
> involved /
> > > have translations from TWB.
> > >
> > > James
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 7:59 AM, John Erling Blad 
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > You can turn it around; give added credits for translations from
> small
> > > > language projects and into the larger ones, that is a lot more
> > > interesting
> > > > than strictly translating from the larger language projects.
> > > >
> > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:55 PM, Jean-Philippe Béland <
> > > > jpbel...@wikimedia.ca
> > > > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > I think the request for such projects should come from the
> concerned
> > > > > language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my
> > simple
> > > > > opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
> > > > >
> > > > > Jean-Philippe Béland
> > > > > Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad  >
> > > > wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less
> > > > interesting
> > > > > > in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad idea, the
> > > > > > translators should be able to chose for themselves. Articles
> should
> > > > also
> > > > > be
> > > > > > pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie vertical
> > > > articles,
> > > > > > as the number of editors that can handle those will be pretty
> > small.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a
> new
> > > > > editor!
> > > > > > You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad <
> > jeb...@gmail.com>
> > > > > > wrote:
> > 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

This is not the same, and is more like the present grant system.

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 8:05 PM, Gnangarra  wrote:

> this would be a good practical exercise to develop for WiR / WikiEd
> programs in universities where they can engage with International Students
> and local students studying additional languages as means of learning the
> written nuances of the individual languages.  Any funding would be better
> utilised in enabling such programs where the flow on impact is more
> likely{fact} to be lasting.  Though I can see value in using a gift/reward
> system for technically disadvantaged communities like the case presented
> about Swahili .The focus would need to be on basic health, hygiene,
> biology, science topics rather than more social or political topics.
>
> On 25 February 2018 at 01:08, Vi to  wrote:
>
> > I'll reply to the most recent email just for laziness.
> >
> > I'm doubtful for a series of reasons, most of were already expressed in a
> > better way by others:
> > *a remuneration in terms of quantity will weaken the quality of
> > translations unless there's a strong mechanism of quality verification
> > requiring a quantity of resources comparable to translations themselves;
> > *articles are the result of a long process which reflects cultural
> identity
> > of different communities, I'm not confident with transferring them to a
> > different "weaker" cultures. My usage of "weaker" adjective only focuses
> > about the strength of a cultural presence on the Internet;
> > *articles to be translated are at high risk of reflecting the cultural
> > identity (and biases) of the Western culture;
> > *finally I think paid translators would hardly turn into stable
> > Wikipedians.
> >
> > IMHO some paid editing may be better exploited in order to digitalise
> texts
> > of unrepresented cultures (wikisource) or preserving their vocabularies
> > (wiktionary).
> >
> > Also those languages which are secondary for all their speakers should be
> > dealt with in a different fashion. I, for one, am a native speaker of
> > specific variant of Sicilian, Sicilian is a secondary language to any of
> > its speakers. Honestly, I'd find pointless to read the biography of
> > Leonardo da Vinci in Sicilian while I can find thousands of books about
> him
> > in Italian. Also I find this kind of translation creates a fake
> "literary"
> > language totally detached from reality: there's no "encaustic painting"
> in
> > Sicilian, still a Sicilian article about Leonardo will invent one.
> >
> > As a general principle we should always collect, rather than create,
> > knowledge.
> >
> > Vito
> >
> > 2018-02-24 16:30 GMT+01:00 John Erling Blad :
> >
> > > My reply can be read as a bit more harsh than intended, it was merely a
> > > statement about my present experience about translators in general.
> > >
> > > The problem with lack of contributors (and translators) in a
> specialized
> > > area is that there is a small community, and within this community some
> > > kind of selection is made. Each time a selection is repeated the
> > remaining
> > > group shrinks. Specialize the selection sufficiently many times and
> there
> > > will be no contributors (or translators) left. It is simply a game of
> > > probabilities. Thus, to make such a project work it must have a
> > > sufficiently broad scope for the articles. Articles about public health
> > > services will probably work even for a pretty small language group, but
> > > specialized medical articles might create a problem. But then you find
> > > a retired
> > > orthopedic surgeon like Subas Chandra Rout…
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 4:04 PM, James Heilman 
> wrote:
> > >
> > > > I agree with John that it is very difficult to turn a translator
> into a
> > > new
> > > > editor. I also agree with Jean-Philippe that it is key to have
> > > involvement
> > > > of the local projects and preferable if they lead the efforts. Of the
> > > > languages we worked in only one explicitly requested not to be
> > involved /
> > > > have translations from TWB.
> > > >
> > > > James
> > > >
> > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 7:59 AM, John Erling Blad 
> > > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > You can turn it around; give added credits for translations from
> > small
> > > > > language projects and into the larger ones, that is a lot more
> > > > interesting
> > > > > than strictly translating from the larger language projects.
> > > > >
> > > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:55 PM, Jean-Philippe Béland <
> > > > > jpbel...@wikimedia.ca
> > > > > > wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > I think the request for such projects should come from the
> > concerned
> > > > > > language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my
> > > simple
> > > > > > opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Jean-Philippe Béland
> > > > > > Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
> > > 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

The source article should meet certain standards, but do not fall in the
trap where the translated articles must themselves be better than some
imagined standard. That would lead to a defunc process.

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 8:41 PM, Michael Snow 
wrote:

> I think the experience I've had with translating matches up well with the
> conclusions James has outlined. Even though I'm more likely to translate
> content into English rather than out of English, the principles still hold.
>
> Trying to produce a translation without quality content in the original
> article is a frustrating and pointless exercise for the translator. Unless
> the original meets certain standards, it would be better and easier to
> write the article from scratch in the "destination" language and translate
> it back to the "source" language.
>
> Assuming we have a good article in the original language, I definitely
> encourage translators to use editorial judgment in what they carry over.
> Focusing on the lead section is one possible approach. In general, because
> we are trying to translate information and not literature, we should have
> different priorities. It is more important that the translation maintain
> fidelity to the facts than to the language and structure of the article.
> Sometimes it makes sense to pass over certain details, even a
> beginning-to-end translation might come out a bit condensed. As one reason
> for this, making some details accessible to the cultural audience in the
> new language can at times require a fair amount of elaboration, more than
> may be ideal for the context under discussion. The best approach to use is
> one of adaptation as much as translation.
>
> I don't have strong feelings about whether a paid model will work, or work
> better than purely volunteer activity, but I would be open to seeing a
> trial. The essential thing is that we find translators who can understand
> and apply standards of quality in their work, much like we would expect if
> they were editors writing entirely new articles.
>
> --Michael Snow
>
>
> On 2/24/2018 5:26 AM, James Heilman wrote:
>
>> We learned a few things during the medical translation project which
>> started back in 2011:
>>
>> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
>> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
>>
>> 2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP. Thus
>> we
>> moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the leads of the
>> English articles.
>>
>> 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts more
>> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that tool
>> improved further such as having it support specific lists of articles that
>> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love the
>> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
>>
>> 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
>> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in
>> which
>> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian there
>> is
>> often already at least some content on many of the topics in question. The
>> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And for
>> languages in which we have little content there are often few avaliable
>> volunteers.
>>
>> 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
>> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the work
>> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so languages
>> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a second
>> review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be
>> accepted.
>>
>> 6) I hired a coordinator for the translation project for a couple of
>> years.
>> The translators at TWB did not want to become Wikipedians or learn how to
>> use our systems. The coordinator created account like TransSW001 (one for
>> each volunteer) and preloaded the article to be translated into Content
>> Translation. They than gave the volunteer translator the user name and
>> password to the account.
>>
>> 7) Were are we at now? There are currently just over 1,000 leads of
>> articles that have been improved and are ready for translation. This
>> includes articles on the 440 medications that are on the WHO Essential
>> List. We have worked a bit in some 100 languages. The efforts have
>> resulted
>> in more than 5 million works translated and integrated into different
>> Wikipedias. The coordinator has unfortunately moved on to his real job of
>> teaching high school students.
>>
>> 8) The project continues but at a slower pace than before. The Wikipedian
>> and retired orthopedic surgeon Subas Chandra Rout has basically single
>> handedly translated nearly all 1,000 leads into Odia a language spoken by
>> 40 million people in Eastern India. The amazing thing is that for 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

Well, what I wrote about was translating the articles on the lists at meta.
In addition the translators themselves chose which one they want to
translate.

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 8:47 PM, Peter Southwood <
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:

> Those who pay get to select what is translated.
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of Jean-Philippe Béland
> Sent: 24 February 2018 16:55
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation
>
> I think the request for such projects should come from the concerned
> language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my simple
> opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
>
> Jean-Philippe Béland
> Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad  wrote:
>
> > Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less
> > interesting in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad
> > idea, the translators should be able to chose for themselves. Articles
> > should also be pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie
> > vertical articles, as the number of editors that can handle those will
> be pretty small.
> >
> > In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new
> editor!
> > You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad 
> > wrote:
> >
> > > 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles
> > > are
> > >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > >
> > >
> > > Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the project.
> > >
> > > 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
> > > more
> > >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see
> > >> that
> > tool
> > >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of
> > >> articles
> > that
> > >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love
> > >> the tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
> > >
> > >
> > > Didn't mention ContentTranslation, but it should be pretty obvious.
> > >
> > > 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> > >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages
> > >> in which their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and
> > >> Italian there is often already at least some content on many of the
> > >> topics in question.
> > The
> > >> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And
> > >> for languages in which we have little content there are often few
> > >> avaliable volunteers.
> > >
> > >
> > > I used projects below 65k articles as an example, as the chance of
> > > competing articles are pretty low.
> > >
> > > 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would
> > > require
> > >> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the
> > >> work seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or
> > >> so
> > languages
> > >> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a
> > >> second review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests
> > >> to be accepted.
> > >
> > >
> > > I'n my original email I wrote "verified good translators". It is as
> > > simple as "Has the editor contributed other articles at the project?"
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 2:26 PM, James Heilman 
> wrote:
> > >
> > >> We learned a few things during the medical translation project
> > >> which started back in 2011:
> > >>
> > >> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles
> > >> are extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > >>
> > >> 2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP.
> > >> Thus we moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the
> > >> leads of the English articles.
> > >>
> > >> 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
> > >> more efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to
> > >> see that
> > tool
> > >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of
> > >> articles
> > that
> > >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love
> > >> the tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
> > >>
> > >> 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> > >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages
> > >> in which their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and
> > >> Italian there is often already at least some content on many of the
> > >> topics in question.
> > The
> > >> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And
> > >> for languages in which we have little content there are often few
> > >> avaliable volunteers.
> > >>
> > >> 5) With respect to 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

It is a long time since everyone on these projects were solely volunteers.
:)

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 PM, Todd Allen  wrote:

> Yes, and then there's always the question. If he's getting paid, why aren't
> I? Why is he getting paid per word of article translated? Why am I not
> getting paid per spamvertisement deleted or vandal blocked? Why am I not
> getting paid for closing discussions that it takes hours of reading input
> and considering all sides and getting rocks thrown at me no matter what I
> do? Is that not valuable to the project as well?
>
> If you want to pay anyone, you better start paying me. I'm okay with the
> idea of being a volunteer as long as everyone is a volunteer. But if you
> start paying some people and not me, we're going to have a problem.
>
> Todd
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 12:47 PM, Peter Southwood <
> peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
>
> > Those who pay get to select what is translated.
> > Cheers,
> > Peter
> >
> > -Original Message-
> > From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> > Behalf Of Jean-Philippe Béland
> > Sent: 24 February 2018 16:55
> > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation
> >
> > I think the request for such projects should come from the concerned
> > language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my simple
> > opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
> >
> > Jean-Philippe Béland
> > Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
> >
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad 
> wrote:
> >
> > > Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less
> > > interesting in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad
> > > idea, the translators should be able to chose for themselves. Articles
> > > should also be pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie
> > > vertical articles, as the number of editors that can handle those will
> > be pretty small.
> > >
> > > In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new
> > editor!
> > > You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad 
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles
> > > > are
> > > >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the project.
> > > >
> > > > 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
> > > > more
> > > >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see
> > > >> that
> > > tool
> > > >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of
> > > >> articles
> > > that
> > > >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love
> > > >> the tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Didn't mention ContentTranslation, but it should be pretty obvious.
> > > >
> > > > 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> > > >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages
> > > >> in which their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and
> > > >> Italian there is often already at least some content on many of the
> > > >> topics in question.
> > > The
> > > >> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And
> > > >> for languages in which we have little content there are often few
> > > >> avaliable volunteers.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > I used projects below 65k articles as an example, as the chance of
> > > > competing articles are pretty low.
> > > >
> > > > 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would
> > > > require
> > > >> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the
> > > >> work seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or
> > > >> so
> > > languages
> > > >> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a
> > > >> second review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests
> > > >> to be accepted.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > I'n my original email I wrote "verified good translators". It is as
> > > > simple as "Has the editor contributed other articles at the project?"
> > > >
> > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 2:26 PM, James Heilman 
> > wrote:
> > > >
> > > >> We learned a few things during the medical translation project
> > > >> which started back in 2011:
> > > >>
> > > >> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles
> > > >> are extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > > >>
> > > >> 2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP.
> > > >> Thus we moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the
> > > >> leads of the English articles.
> > > >>
> > > >> 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
> > > >> more efficient 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[Yaroslav Blanter]

I actually agree with Todd, and I though this is actually a reason why WMF
staff may not edit articles (at least not from WMF accounts). I am afraid
disadvantages due to the broken symmetry will be bigger than advantages due
to actual content translated.

Cheers
Yaroslav

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 PM, Todd Allen  wrote:

> Yes, and then there's always the question. If he's getting paid, why aren't
> I? Why is he getting paid per word of article translated? Why am I not
> getting paid per spamvertisement deleted or vandal blocked? Why am I not
> getting paid for closing discussions that it takes hours of reading input
> and considering all sides and getting rocks thrown at me no matter what I
> do? Is that not valuable to the project as well?
>
> If you want to pay anyone, you better start paying me. I'm okay with the
> idea of being a volunteer as long as everyone is a volunteer. But if you
> start paying some people and not me, we're going to have a problem.
>
> Todd
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 12:47 PM, Peter Southwood <
> peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
>
> > Those who pay get to select what is translated.
> > Cheers,
> > Peter
> >
> > -Original Message-
> > From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> > Behalf Of Jean-Philippe Béland
> > Sent: 24 February 2018 16:55
> > To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation
> >
> > I think the request for such projects should come from the concerned
> > language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my simple
> > opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
> >
> > Jean-Philippe Béland
> > Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
> >
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad 
> wrote:
> >
> > > Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less
> > > interesting in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad
> > > idea, the translators should be able to chose for themselves. Articles
> > > should also be pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie
> > > vertical articles, as the number of editors that can handle those will
> > be pretty small.
> > >
> > > In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new
> > editor!
> > > You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad 
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles
> > > > are
> > > >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the project.
> > > >
> > > > 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
> > > > more
> > > >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see
> > > >> that
> > > tool
> > > >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of
> > > >> articles
> > > that
> > > >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love
> > > >> the tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Didn't mention ContentTranslation, but it should be pretty obvious.
> > > >
> > > > 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> > > >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages
> > > >> in which their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and
> > > >> Italian there is often already at least some content on many of the
> > > >> topics in question.
> > > The
> > > >> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And
> > > >> for languages in which we have little content there are often few
> > > >> avaliable volunteers.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > I used projects below 65k articles as an example, as the chance of
> > > > competing articles are pretty low.
> > > >
> > > > 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would
> > > > require
> > > >> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the
> > > >> work seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or
> > > >> so
> > > languages
> > > >> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a
> > > >> second review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests
> > > >> to be accepted.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > I'n my original email I wrote "verified good translators". It is as
> > > > simple as "Has the editor contributed other articles at the project?"
> > > >
> > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 2:26 PM, James Heilman 
> > wrote:
> > > >
> > > >> We learned a few things during the medical translation project
> > > >> which started back in 2011:
> > > >>
> > > >> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles
> > > >> are extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > > >>
> > > >> 2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP.
> > > >> Thus we moved to just 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[Todd Allen]

Yes, and then there's always the question. If he's getting paid, why aren't
I? Why is he getting paid per word of article translated? Why am I not
getting paid per spamvertisement deleted or vandal blocked? Why am I not
getting paid for closing discussions that it takes hours of reading input
and considering all sides and getting rocks thrown at me no matter what I
do? Is that not valuable to the project as well?

If you want to pay anyone, you better start paying me. I'm okay with the
idea of being a volunteer as long as everyone is a volunteer. But if you
start paying some people and not me, we're going to have a problem.

Todd

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 12:47 PM, Peter Southwood <
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:

> Those who pay get to select what is translated.
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of Jean-Philippe Béland
> Sent: 24 February 2018 16:55
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation
>
> I think the request for such projects should come from the concerned
> language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my simple
> opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
>
> Jean-Philippe Béland
> Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad  wrote:
>
> > Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less
> > interesting in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad
> > idea, the translators should be able to chose for themselves. Articles
> > should also be pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie
> > vertical articles, as the number of editors that can handle those will
> be pretty small.
> >
> > In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new
> editor!
> > You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad 
> > wrote:
> >
> > > 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles
> > > are
> > >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > >
> > >
> > > Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the project.
> > >
> > > 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
> > > more
> > >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see
> > >> that
> > tool
> > >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of
> > >> articles
> > that
> > >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love
> > >> the tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
> > >
> > >
> > > Didn't mention ContentTranslation, but it should be pretty obvious.
> > >
> > > 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> > >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages
> > >> in which their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and
> > >> Italian there is often already at least some content on many of the
> > >> topics in question.
> > The
> > >> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And
> > >> for languages in which we have little content there are often few
> > >> avaliable volunteers.
> > >
> > >
> > > I used projects below 65k articles as an example, as the chance of
> > > competing articles are pretty low.
> > >
> > > 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would
> > > require
> > >> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the
> > >> work seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or
> > >> so
> > languages
> > >> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a
> > >> second review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests
> > >> to be accepted.
> > >
> > >
> > > I'n my original email I wrote "verified good translators". It is as
> > > simple as "Has the editor contributed other articles at the project?"
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 2:26 PM, James Heilman 
> wrote:
> > >
> > >> We learned a few things during the medical translation project
> > >> which started back in 2011:
> > >>
> > >> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles
> > >> are extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > >>
> > >> 2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP.
> > >> Thus we moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the
> > >> leads of the English articles.
> > >>
> > >> 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
> > >> more efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to
> > >> see that
> > tool
> > >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of
> > >> articles
> > that
> > >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love
> > >> the tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
> > >>
> > >> 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[Peter Southwood]

Those who pay get to select what is translated. 
Cheers,
Peter

-Original Message-
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of 
Jean-Philippe Béland
Sent: 24 February 2018 16:55
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

I think the request for such projects should come from the concerned language 
projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my simple opinion, it is a 
form of coloniasm again.

Jean-Philippe Béland
Vice President, Wikimedia Canada


On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad  wrote:

> Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less 
> interesting in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad 
> idea, the translators should be able to chose for themselves. Articles 
> should also be pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie 
> vertical articles, as the number of editors that can handle those will be 
> pretty small.
>
> In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new editor!
> You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad 
> wrote:
>
> > 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles 
> > are
> >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> >
> >
> > Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the project.
> >
> > 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts 
> > more
> >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see 
> >> that
> tool
> >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of 
> >> articles
> that
> >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love 
> >> the tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
> >
> >
> > Didn't mention ContentTranslation, but it should be pretty obvious.
> >
> > 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages 
> >> in which their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and 
> >> Italian there is often already at least some content on many of the 
> >> topics in question.
> The
> >> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And 
> >> for languages in which we have little content there are often few 
> >> avaliable volunteers.
> >
> >
> > I used projects below 65k articles as an example, as the chance of 
> > competing articles are pretty low.
> >
> > 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would 
> > require
> >> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the 
> >> work seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or 
> >> so
> languages
> >> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a 
> >> second review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests 
> >> to be accepted.
> >
> >
> > I'n my original email I wrote "verified good translators". It is as 
> > simple as "Has the editor contributed other articles at the project?"
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 2:26 PM, James Heilman  wrote:
> >
> >> We learned a few things during the medical translation project 
> >> which started back in 2011:
> >>
> >> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles 
> >> are extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> >>
> >> 2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP. 
> >> Thus we moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the 
> >> leads of the English articles.
> >>
> >> 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts 
> >> more efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to 
> >> see that
> tool
> >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of 
> >> articles
> that
> >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love 
> >> the tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
> >>
> >> 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner 
> >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages 
> >> in which their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and 
> >> Italian there is often already at least some content on many of the 
> >> topics in question.
> The
> >> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And 
> >> for languages in which we have little content there are often few 
> >> avaliable volunteers.
> >>
> >> 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would 
> >> require significant checks and balances to make sure people are 
> >> taking the work seriously and not simple using Google translate for 
> >> the 70 or so
> languages
> >> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a 
> >> second review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests 
> >> to be accepted.
> >>
> >> 6) I hired a coordinator for the 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[Michael Snow]

I think the experience I've had with translating matches up well with 
the conclusions James has outlined. Even though I'm more likely to 
translate content into English rather than out of English, the 
principles still hold.


Trying to produce a translation without quality content in the original 
article is a frustrating and pointless exercise for the translator. 
Unless the original meets certain standards, it would be better and 
easier to write the article from scratch in the "destination" language 
and translate it back to the "source" language.


Assuming we have a good article in the original language, I definitely 
encourage translators to use editorial judgment in what they carry over. 
Focusing on the lead section is one possible approach. In general, 
because we are trying to translate information and not literature, we 
should have different priorities. It is more important that the 
translation maintain fidelity to the facts than to the language and 
structure of the article. Sometimes it makes sense to pass over certain 
details, even a beginning-to-end translation might come out a bit 
condensed. As one reason for this, making some details accessible to the 
cultural audience in the new language can at times require a fair amount 
of elaboration, more than may be ideal for the context under discussion. 
The best approach to use is one of adaptation as much as translation.


I don't have strong feelings about whether a paid model will work, or 
work better than purely volunteer activity, but I would be open to 
seeing a trial. The essential thing is that we find translators who can 
understand and apply standards of quality in their work, much like we 
would expect if they were editors writing entirely new articles.


--Michael Snow

On 2/24/2018 5:26 AM, James Heilman wrote:

We learned a few things during the medical translation project which
started back in 2011:

1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
extensively improved before being proposed for translation.

2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP. Thus we
moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the leads of the
English articles.

3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts more
efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that tool
improved further such as having it support specific lists of articles that
are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love the
tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.

4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in which
their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian there is
often already at least some content on many of the topics in question. The
issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And for
languages in which we have little content there are often few avaliable
volunteers.

5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the work
seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so languages
in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a second
review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be accepted.

6) I hired a coordinator for the translation project for a couple of years.
The translators at TWB did not want to become Wikipedians or learn how to
use our systems. The coordinator created account like TransSW001 (one for
each volunteer) and preloaded the article to be translated into Content
Translation. They than gave the volunteer translator the user name and
password to the account.

7) Were are we at now? There are currently just over 1,000 leads of
articles that have been improved and are ready for translation. This
includes articles on the 440 medications that are on the WHO Essential
List. We have worked a bit in some 100 languages. The efforts have resulted
in more than 5 million works translated and integrated into different
Wikipedias. The coordinator has unfortunately moved on to his real job of
teaching high school students.

8) The project continues but at a slower pace than before. The Wikipedian
and retired orthopedic surgeon Subas Chandra Rout has basically single
handedly translated nearly all 1,000 leads into Odia a language spoken by
40 million people in Eastern India. The amazing thing is that for many of
these topics this is the first and only information online about it. Google
translate does not even claim to work in this language. Our partnerships
with WMTW and medical school in Taipai continue to translate into Chinese.
There the students translate and than their translations are reviewed by
their profs before being posted. They translate in groups using hackpad to
make it more social.

I am currently working to re invigorate the project :-)
James

On Sat, 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[Gnangarra]

this would be a good practical exercise to develop for WiR / WikiEd
programs in universities where they can engage with International Students
and local students studying additional languages as means of learning the
written nuances of the individual languages.  Any funding would be better
utilised in enabling such programs where the flow on impact is more
likely{fact} to be lasting.  Though I can see value in using a gift/reward
system for technically disadvantaged communities like the case presented
about Swahili .The focus would need to be on basic health, hygiene,
biology, science topics rather than more social or political topics.

On 25 February 2018 at 01:08, Vi to  wrote:

> I'll reply to the most recent email just for laziness.
>
> I'm doubtful for a series of reasons, most of were already expressed in a
> better way by others:
> *a remuneration in terms of quantity will weaken the quality of
> translations unless there's a strong mechanism of quality verification
> requiring a quantity of resources comparable to translations themselves;
> *articles are the result of a long process which reflects cultural identity
> of different communities, I'm not confident with transferring them to a
> different "weaker" cultures. My usage of "weaker" adjective only focuses
> about the strength of a cultural presence on the Internet;
> *articles to be translated are at high risk of reflecting the cultural
> identity (and biases) of the Western culture;
> *finally I think paid translators would hardly turn into stable
> Wikipedians.
>
> IMHO some paid editing may be better exploited in order to digitalise texts
> of unrepresented cultures (wikisource) or preserving their vocabularies
> (wiktionary).
>
> Also those languages which are secondary for all their speakers should be
> dealt with in a different fashion. I, for one, am a native speaker of
> specific variant of Sicilian, Sicilian is a secondary language to any of
> its speakers. Honestly, I'd find pointless to read the biography of
> Leonardo da Vinci in Sicilian while I can find thousands of books about him
> in Italian. Also I find this kind of translation creates a fake "literary"
> language totally detached from reality: there's no "encaustic painting" in
> Sicilian, still a Sicilian article about Leonardo will invent one.
>
> As a general principle we should always collect, rather than create,
> knowledge.
>
> Vito
>
> 2018-02-24 16:30 GMT+01:00 John Erling Blad :
>
> > My reply can be read as a bit more harsh than intended, it was merely a
> > statement about my present experience about translators in general.
> >
> > The problem with lack of contributors (and translators) in a specialized
> > area is that there is a small community, and within this community some
> > kind of selection is made. Each time a selection is repeated the
> remaining
> > group shrinks. Specialize the selection sufficiently many times and there
> > will be no contributors (or translators) left. It is simply a game of
> > probabilities. Thus, to make such a project work it must have a
> > sufficiently broad scope for the articles. Articles about public health
> > services will probably work even for a pretty small language group, but
> > specialized medical articles might create a problem. But then you find
> > a retired
> > orthopedic surgeon like Subas Chandra Rout…
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 4:04 PM, James Heilman  wrote:
> >
> > > I agree with John that it is very difficult to turn a translator into a
> > new
> > > editor. I also agree with Jean-Philippe that it is key to have
> > involvement
> > > of the local projects and preferable if they lead the efforts. Of the
> > > languages we worked in only one explicitly requested not to be
> involved /
> > > have translations from TWB.
> > >
> > > James
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 7:59 AM, John Erling Blad 
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > You can turn it around; give added credits for translations from
> small
> > > > language projects and into the larger ones, that is a lot more
> > > interesting
> > > > than strictly translating from the larger language projects.
> > > >
> > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:55 PM, Jean-Philippe Béland <
> > > > jpbel...@wikimedia.ca
> > > > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > I think the request for such projects should come from the
> concerned
> > > > > language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my
> > simple
> > > > > opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
> > > > >
> > > > > Jean-Philippe Béland
> > > > > Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad  >
> > > > wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less
> > > > interesting
> > > > > > in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad idea, the
> > > > > > translators should be able to chose for 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[Vi to]

I'll reply to the most recent email just for laziness.

I'm doubtful for a series of reasons, most of were already expressed in a
better way by others:
*a remuneration in terms of quantity will weaken the quality of
translations unless there's a strong mechanism of quality verification
requiring a quantity of resources comparable to translations themselves;
*articles are the result of a long process which reflects cultural identity
of different communities, I'm not confident with transferring them to a
different "weaker" cultures. My usage of "weaker" adjective only focuses
about the strength of a cultural presence on the Internet;
*articles to be translated are at high risk of reflecting the cultural
identity (and biases) of the Western culture;
*finally I think paid translators would hardly turn into stable Wikipedians.

IMHO some paid editing may be better exploited in order to digitalise texts
of unrepresented cultures (wikisource) or preserving their vocabularies
(wiktionary).

Also those languages which are secondary for all their speakers should be
dealt with in a different fashion. I, for one, am a native speaker of
specific variant of Sicilian, Sicilian is a secondary language to any of
its speakers. Honestly, I'd find pointless to read the biography of
Leonardo da Vinci in Sicilian while I can find thousands of books about him
in Italian. Also I find this kind of translation creates a fake "literary"
language totally detached from reality: there's no "encaustic painting" in
Sicilian, still a Sicilian article about Leonardo will invent one.

As a general principle we should always collect, rather than create,
knowledge.

Vito

2018-02-24 16:30 GMT+01:00 John Erling Blad :

> My reply can be read as a bit more harsh than intended, it was merely a
> statement about my present experience about translators in general.
>
> The problem with lack of contributors (and translators) in a specialized
> area is that there is a small community, and within this community some
> kind of selection is made. Each time a selection is repeated the remaining
> group shrinks. Specialize the selection sufficiently many times and there
> will be no contributors (or translators) left. It is simply a game of
> probabilities. Thus, to make such a project work it must have a
> sufficiently broad scope for the articles. Articles about public health
> services will probably work even for a pretty small language group, but
> specialized medical articles might create a problem. But then you find
> a retired
> orthopedic surgeon like Subas Chandra Rout…
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 4:04 PM, James Heilman  wrote:
>
> > I agree with John that it is very difficult to turn a translator into a
> new
> > editor. I also agree with Jean-Philippe that it is key to have
> involvement
> > of the local projects and preferable if they lead the efforts. Of the
> > languages we worked in only one explicitly requested not to be involved /
> > have translations from TWB.
> >
> > James
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 7:59 AM, John Erling Blad 
> > wrote:
> >
> > > You can turn it around; give added credits for translations from small
> > > language projects and into the larger ones, that is a lot more
> > interesting
> > > than strictly translating from the larger language projects.
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:55 PM, Jean-Philippe Béland <
> > > jpbel...@wikimedia.ca
> > > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > I think the request for such projects should come from the concerned
> > > > language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my
> simple
> > > > opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
> > > >
> > > > Jean-Philippe Béland
> > > > Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad 
> > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less
> > > interesting
> > > > > in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad idea, the
> > > > > translators should be able to chose for themselves. Articles should
> > > also
> > > > be
> > > > > pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie vertical
> > > articles,
> > > > > as the number of editors that can handle those will be pretty
> small.
> > > > >
> > > > > In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new
> > > > editor!
> > > > > You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.
> > > > >
> > > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad <
> jeb...@gmail.com>
> > > > > wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles
> > are
> > > > > >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the
> > project.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made
> efforts
> > > > more
> > > > > >> efficient 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

My reply can be read as a bit more harsh than intended, it was merely a
statement about my present experience about translators in general.

The problem with lack of contributors (and translators) in a specialized
area is that there is a small community, and within this community some
kind of selection is made. Each time a selection is repeated the remaining
group shrinks. Specialize the selection sufficiently many times and there
will be no contributors (or translators) left. It is simply a game of
probabilities. Thus, to make such a project work it must have a
sufficiently broad scope for the articles. Articles about public health
services will probably work even for a pretty small language group, but
specialized medical articles might create a problem. But then you find
a retired
orthopedic surgeon like Subas Chandra Rout…

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 4:04 PM, James Heilman  wrote:

> I agree with John that it is very difficult to turn a translator into a new
> editor. I also agree with Jean-Philippe that it is key to have involvement
> of the local projects and preferable if they lead the efforts. Of the
> languages we worked in only one explicitly requested not to be involved /
> have translations from TWB.
>
> James
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 7:59 AM, John Erling Blad 
> wrote:
>
> > You can turn it around; give added credits for translations from small
> > language projects and into the larger ones, that is a lot more
> interesting
> > than strictly translating from the larger language projects.
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:55 PM, Jean-Philippe Béland <
> > jpbel...@wikimedia.ca
> > > wrote:
> >
> > > I think the request for such projects should come from the concerned
> > > language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my simple
> > > opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
> > >
> > > Jean-Philippe Béland
> > > Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
> > >
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad 
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less
> > interesting
> > > > in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad idea, the
> > > > translators should be able to chose for themselves. Articles should
> > also
> > > be
> > > > pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie vertical
> > articles,
> > > > as the number of editors that can handle those will be pretty small.
> > > >
> > > > In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new
> > > editor!
> > > > You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.
> > > >
> > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad 
> > > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles
> are
> > > > >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the
> project.
> > > > >
> > > > > 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
> > > more
> > > > >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see
> that
> > > > tool
> > > > >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of
> > articles
> > > > that
> > > > >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also
> love
> > > the
> > > > >> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > Didn't mention ContentTranslation, but it should be pretty obvious.
> > > > >
> > > > > 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> > > > >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages
> > in
> > > > >> which
> > > > >> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian
> > > there
> > > > >> is
> > > > >> often already at least some content on many of the topics in
> > question.
> > > > The
> > > > >> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia.
> And
> > > for
> > > > >> languages in which we have little content there are often few
> > > avaliable
> > > > >> volunteers.
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > I used projects below 65k articles as an example, as the chance of
> > > > > competing articles are pretty low.
> > > > >
> > > > > 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would
> > require
> > > > >> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the
> > > work
> > > > >> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so
> > > > languages
> > > > >> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a
> > second
> > > > >> review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be
> > > > >> accepted.
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > I'n my original email I wrote "verified good translators". It is as
> > > > > simple as "Has the editor contributed other articles at the
> project?"
> > > > >
> > > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 2:26 PM, James Heilman 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[James Heilman]

I agree with John that it is very difficult to turn a translator into a new
editor. I also agree with Jean-Philippe that it is key to have involvement
of the local projects and preferable if they lead the efforts. Of the
languages we worked in only one explicitly requested not to be involved /
have translations from TWB.

James

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 7:59 AM, John Erling Blad  wrote:

> You can turn it around; give added credits for translations from small
> language projects and into the larger ones, that is a lot more interesting
> than strictly translating from the larger language projects.
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:55 PM, Jean-Philippe Béland <
> jpbel...@wikimedia.ca
> > wrote:
>
> > I think the request for such projects should come from the concerned
> > language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my simple
> > opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
> >
> > Jean-Philippe Béland
> > Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
> >
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad 
> wrote:
> >
> > > Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less
> interesting
> > > in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad idea, the
> > > translators should be able to chose for themselves. Articles should
> also
> > be
> > > pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie vertical
> articles,
> > > as the number of editors that can handle those will be pretty small.
> > >
> > > In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new
> > editor!
> > > You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad 
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
> > > >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the project.
> > > >
> > > > 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
> > more
> > > >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that
> > > tool
> > > >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of
> articles
> > > that
> > > >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love
> > the
> > > >> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Didn't mention ContentTranslation, but it should be pretty obvious.
> > > >
> > > > 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> > > >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages
> in
> > > >> which
> > > >> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian
> > there
> > > >> is
> > > >> often already at least some content on many of the topics in
> question.
> > > The
> > > >> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And
> > for
> > > >> languages in which we have little content there are often few
> > avaliable
> > > >> volunteers.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > I used projects below 65k articles as an example, as the chance of
> > > > competing articles are pretty low.
> > > >
> > > > 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would
> require
> > > >> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the
> > work
> > > >> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so
> > > languages
> > > >> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a
> second
> > > >> review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be
> > > >> accepted.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > I'n my original email I wrote "verified good translators". It is as
> > > > simple as "Has the editor contributed other articles at the project?"
> > > >
> > > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 2:26 PM, James Heilman 
> > wrote:
> > > >
> > > >> We learned a few things during the medical translation project which
> > > >> started back in 2011:
> > > >>
> > > >> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles
> are
> > > >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > > >>
> > > >> 2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP.
> > Thus
> > > >> we
> > > >> moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the leads of
> > the
> > > >> English articles.
> > > >>
> > > >> 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
> > more
> > > >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that
> > > tool
> > > >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of
> articles
> > > that
> > > >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love
> > the
> > > >> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
> > > >>
> > > >> 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> > > >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages
> in
> > > >> which
> > > >> 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

You can turn it around; give added credits for translations from small
language projects and into the larger ones, that is a lot more interesting
than strictly translating from the larger language projects.

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:55 PM, Jean-Philippe Béland  wrote:

> I think the request for such projects should come from the concerned
> language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my simple
> opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
>
> Jean-Philippe Béland
> Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad  wrote:
>
> > Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less interesting
> > in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad idea, the
> > translators should be able to chose for themselves. Articles should also
> be
> > pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie vertical articles,
> > as the number of editors that can handle those will be pretty small.
> >
> > In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new
> editor!
> > You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad 
> > wrote:
> >
> > > 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
> > >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > >
> > >
> > > Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the project.
> > >
> > > 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
> more
> > >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that
> > tool
> > >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of articles
> > that
> > >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love
> the
> > >> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
> > >
> > >
> > > Didn't mention ContentTranslation, but it should be pretty obvious.
> > >
> > > 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> > >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in
> > >> which
> > >> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian
> there
> > >> is
> > >> often already at least some content on many of the topics in question.
> > The
> > >> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And
> for
> > >> languages in which we have little content there are often few
> avaliable
> > >> volunteers.
> > >
> > >
> > > I used projects below 65k articles as an example, as the chance of
> > > competing articles are pretty low.
> > >
> > > 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
> > >> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the
> work
> > >> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so
> > languages
> > >> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a second
> > >> review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be
> > >> accepted.
> > >
> > >
> > > I'n my original email I wrote "verified good translators". It is as
> > > simple as "Has the editor contributed other articles at the project?"
> > >
> > > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 2:26 PM, James Heilman 
> wrote:
> > >
> > >> We learned a few things during the medical translation project which
> > >> started back in 2011:
> > >>
> > >> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
> > >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> > >>
> > >> 2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP.
> Thus
> > >> we
> > >> moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the leads of
> the
> > >> English articles.
> > >>
> > >> 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
> more
> > >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that
> > tool
> > >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of articles
> > that
> > >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love
> the
> > >> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
> > >>
> > >> 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> > >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in
> > >> which
> > >> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian
> there
> > >> is
> > >> often already at least some content on many of the topics in question.
> > The
> > >> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And
> for
> > >> languages in which we have little content there are often few
> avaliable
> > >> volunteers.
> > >>
> > >> 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
> > >> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the
> work
> > >> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so
> > languages
> > >> in which it claims to work. We often had 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[Jean-Philippe Béland]

Thank you James for this detailed feedback. It is very interesting.

JP

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 8:27 AM James Heilman  wrote:

> We learned a few things during the medical translation project which
> started back in 2011:
>
> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
>
> 2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP. Thus we
> moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the leads of the
> English articles.
>
> 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts more
> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that tool
> improved further such as having it support specific lists of articles that
> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love the
> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
>
> 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in which
> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian there is
> often already at least some content on many of the topics in question. The
> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And for
> languages in which we have little content there are often few avaliable
> volunteers.
>
> 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the work
> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so languages
> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a second
> review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be accepted.
>
> 6) I hired a coordinator for the translation project for a couple of years.
> The translators at TWB did not want to become Wikipedians or learn how to
> use our systems. The coordinator created account like TransSW001 (one for
> each volunteer) and preloaded the article to be translated into Content
> Translation. They than gave the volunteer translator the user name and
> password to the account.
>
> 7) Were are we at now? There are currently just over 1,000 leads of
> articles that have been improved and are ready for translation. This
> includes articles on the 440 medications that are on the WHO Essential
> List. We have worked a bit in some 100 languages. The efforts have resulted
> in more than 5 million works translated and integrated into different
> Wikipedias. The coordinator has unfortunately moved on to his real job of
> teaching high school students.
>
> 8) The project continues but at a slower pace than before. The Wikipedian
> and retired orthopedic surgeon Subas Chandra Rout has basically single
> handedly translated nearly all 1,000 leads into Odia a language spoken by
> 40 million people in Eastern India. The amazing thing is that for many of
> these topics this is the first and only information online about it. Google
> translate does not even claim to work in this language. Our partnerships
> with WMTW and medical school in Taipai continue to translate into Chinese.
> There the students translate and than their translations are reviewed by
> their profs before being posted. They translate in groups using hackpad to
> make it more social.
>
> I am currently working to re invigorate the project :-)
> James
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 5:51 AM, John Erling Blad 
> wrote:
>
> > This discussion is going to be fun! =D
> >
> > A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles,
> > the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.
> >
> > What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There
> are
> > several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from
> > "List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten
> thousand
> > articles from the expanded list[2].
> >
> > Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about
> $1
> > for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another
> > language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
> > countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks
> > good translation tools.
> >
> > I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as
> > without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community
> at
> > all. By not paying for new articles, and only translating well-referenced
> > articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be avoided.
> Perhaps
> > we should also identify good source articles, that would be a help.
> > Translated articles should be above some minimum size, but they does not
> > have to be full translations of the source article.
> >
> > A real problem is that our existing lists of good articles other projects
> > should have is pretty much biased towards Western World, so they need a
> lot
> > of 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[Jean-Philippe Béland]

I think the request for such projects should come from the concerned
language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my simple
opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.

Jean-Philippe Béland
Vice President, Wikimedia Canada


On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad  wrote:

> Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less interesting
> in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad idea, the
> translators should be able to chose for themselves. Articles should also be
> pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie vertical articles,
> as the number of editors that can handle those will be pretty small.
>
> In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new editor!
> You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad 
> wrote:
>
> > 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
> >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> >
> >
> > Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the project.
> >
> > 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts more
> >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that
> tool
> >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of articles
> that
> >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love the
> >> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
> >
> >
> > Didn't mention ContentTranslation, but it should be pretty obvious.
> >
> > 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in
> >> which
> >> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian there
> >> is
> >> often already at least some content on many of the topics in question.
> The
> >> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And for
> >> languages in which we have little content there are often few avaliable
> >> volunteers.
> >
> >
> > I used projects below 65k articles as an example, as the chance of
> > competing articles are pretty low.
> >
> > 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
> >> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the work
> >> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so
> languages
> >> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a second
> >> review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be
> >> accepted.
> >
> >
> > I'n my original email I wrote "verified good translators". It is as
> > simple as "Has the editor contributed other articles at the project?"
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 2:26 PM, James Heilman  wrote:
> >
> >> We learned a few things during the medical translation project which
> >> started back in 2011:
> >>
> >> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
> >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
> >>
> >> 2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP. Thus
> >> we
> >> moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the leads of the
> >> English articles.
> >>
> >> 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts more
> >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that
> tool
> >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of articles
> that
> >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love the
> >> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
> >>
> >> 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in
> >> which
> >> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian there
> >> is
> >> often already at least some content on many of the topics in question.
> The
> >> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And for
> >> languages in which we have little content there are often few avaliable
> >> volunteers.
> >>
> >> 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
> >> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the work
> >> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so
> languages
> >> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a second
> >> review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be
> >> accepted.
> >>
> >> 6) I hired a coordinator for the translation project for a couple of
> >> years.
> >> The translators at TWB did not want to become Wikipedians or learn how
> to
> >> use our systems. The coordinator created account like TransSW001 (one
> for
> >> each volunteer) and preloaded the article to be translated into Content
> >> Translation. They than gave the volunteer translator the user name and
> >> 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[Jean-Philippe Béland]

colonialism *


On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:55 AM Jean-Philippe Béland 
wrote:

> I think the request for such projects should come from the concerned
> language projects, same for the list of articles. If not, in my simple
> opinion, it is a form of coloniasm again.
>
> Jean-Philippe Béland
> Vice President, Wikimedia Canada
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 9:40 AM John Erling Blad  wrote:
>
>> Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less interesting
>> in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad idea, the
>> translators should be able to chose for themselves. Articles should also
>> be
>> pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie vertical articles,
>> as the number of editors that can handle those will be pretty small.
>>
>> In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new editor!
>> You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad 
>> wrote:
>>
>> > 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
>> >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
>> >
>> >
>> > Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the project.
>> >
>> > 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts more
>> >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that
>> tool
>> >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of articles
>> that
>> >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love the
>> >> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
>> >
>> >
>> > Didn't mention ContentTranslation, but it should be pretty obvious.
>> >
>> > 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
>> >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in
>> >> which
>> >> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian
>> there
>> >> is
>> >> often already at least some content on many of the topics in question.
>> The
>> >> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And for
>> >> languages in which we have little content there are often few avaliable
>> >> volunteers.
>> >
>> >
>> > I used projects below 65k articles as an example, as the chance of
>> > competing articles are pretty low.
>> >
>> > 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
>> >> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the work
>> >> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so
>> languages
>> >> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a second
>> >> review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be
>> >> accepted.
>> >
>> >
>> > I'n my original email I wrote "verified good translators". It is as
>> > simple as "Has the editor contributed other articles at the project?"
>> >
>> > On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 2:26 PM, James Heilman 
>> wrote:
>> >
>> >> We learned a few things during the medical translation project which
>> >> started back in 2011:
>> >>
>> >> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
>> >> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
>> >>
>> >> 2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP.
>> Thus
>> >> we
>> >> moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the leads of the
>> >> English articles.
>> >>
>> >> 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts
>> more
>> >> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that
>> tool
>> >> improved further such as having it support specific lists of articles
>> that
>> >> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love the
>> >> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
>> >>
>> >> 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
>> >> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in
>> >> which
>> >> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian
>> there
>> >> is
>> >> often already at least some content on many of the topics in question.
>> The
>> >> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And for
>> >> languages in which we have little content there are often few avaliable
>> >> volunteers.
>> >>
>> >> 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
>> >> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the work
>> >> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so
>> languages
>> >> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a second
>> >> review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be
>> >> accepted.
>> >>
>> >> 6) I hired a coordinator for the translation project for a couple of
>> >> years.
>> >> The translators at TWB did not want to become Wikipedians or learn how
>> to
>> >> use 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

Should have added that the remaining points are somewhat less interesting
in this context. Preloading a set of articles is a bad idea, the
translators should be able to chose for themselves. Articles should also be
pretty broad, not very narrow technical or medical, ie vertical articles,
as the number of editors that can handle those will be pretty small.

In particular: Do not believe you can turn a teanslator into a new editor!
You can although turn an existing editor into a translator.

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 3:34 PM, John Erling Blad  wrote:

> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
>> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
>
>
> Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the project.
>
> 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts more
>> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that tool
>> improved further such as having it support specific lists of articles that
>> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love the
>> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
>
>
> Didn't mention ContentTranslation, but it should be pretty obvious.
>
> 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
>> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in
>> which
>> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian there
>> is
>> often already at least some content on many of the topics in question. The
>> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And for
>> languages in which we have little content there are often few avaliable
>> volunteers.
>
>
> I used projects below 65k articles as an example, as the chance of
> competing articles are pretty low.
>
> 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
>> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the work
>> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so languages
>> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a second
>> review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be
>> accepted.
>
>
> I'n my original email I wrote "verified good translators". It is as
> simple as "Has the editor contributed other articles at the project?"
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 2:26 PM, James Heilman  wrote:
>
>> We learned a few things during the medical translation project which
>> started back in 2011:
>>
>> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
>> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
>>
>> 2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP. Thus
>> we
>> moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the leads of the
>> English articles.
>>
>> 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts more
>> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that tool
>> improved further such as having it support specific lists of articles that
>> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love the
>> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
>>
>> 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
>> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in
>> which
>> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian there
>> is
>> often already at least some content on many of the topics in question. The
>> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And for
>> languages in which we have little content there are often few avaliable
>> volunteers.
>>
>> 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
>> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the work
>> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so languages
>> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a second
>> review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be
>> accepted.
>>
>> 6) I hired a coordinator for the translation project for a couple of
>> years.
>> The translators at TWB did not want to become Wikipedians or learn how to
>> use our systems. The coordinator created account like TransSW001 (one for
>> each volunteer) and preloaded the article to be translated into Content
>> Translation. They than gave the volunteer translator the user name and
>> password to the account.
>>
>> 7) Were are we at now? There are currently just over 1,000 leads of
>> articles that have been improved and are ready for translation. This
>> includes articles on the 440 medications that are on the WHO Essential
>> List. We have worked a bit in some 100 languages. The efforts have
>> resulted
>> in more than 5 million works translated and integrated into different
>> Wikipedias. The coordinator has unfortunately moved on to his real job of
>> teaching high school students.
>>
>> 8) The 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

>
> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.


Note that to much pressure on "quality" can easily kill the project.

3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts more
> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that tool
> improved further such as having it support specific lists of articles that
> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love the
> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.


Didn't mention ContentTranslation, but it should be pretty obvious.

4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in which
> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian there is
> often already at least some content on many of the topics in question. The
> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And for
> languages in which we have little content there are often few avaliable
> volunteers.


I used projects below 65k articles as an example, as the chance of
competing articles are pretty low.

5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the work
> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so languages
> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a second
> review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be accepted.


I'n my original email I wrote "verified good translators". It is as simple
as "Has the editor contributed other articles at the project?"

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 2:26 PM, James Heilman  wrote:

> We learned a few things during the medical translation project which
> started back in 2011:
>
> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
>
> 2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP. Thus we
> moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the leads of the
> English articles.
>
> 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts more
> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that tool
> improved further such as having it support specific lists of articles that
> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love the
> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
>
> 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in which
> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian there is
> often already at least some content on many of the topics in question. The
> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And for
> languages in which we have little content there are often few avaliable
> volunteers.
>
> 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the work
> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so languages
> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a second
> review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be accepted.
>
> 6) I hired a coordinator for the translation project for a couple of years.
> The translators at TWB did not want to become Wikipedians or learn how to
> use our systems. The coordinator created account like TransSW001 (one for
> each volunteer) and preloaded the article to be translated into Content
> Translation. They than gave the volunteer translator the user name and
> password to the account.
>
> 7) Were are we at now? There are currently just over 1,000 leads of
> articles that have been improved and are ready for translation. This
> includes articles on the 440 medications that are on the WHO Essential
> List. We have worked a bit in some 100 languages. The efforts have resulted
> in more than 5 million works translated and integrated into different
> Wikipedias. The coordinator has unfortunately moved on to his real job of
> teaching high school students.
>
> 8) The project continues but at a slower pace than before. The Wikipedian
> and retired orthopedic surgeon Subas Chandra Rout has basically single
> handedly translated nearly all 1,000 leads into Odia a language spoken by
> 40 million people in Eastern India. The amazing thing is that for many of
> these topics this is the first and only information online about it. Google
> translate does not even claim to work in this language. Our partnerships
> with WMTW and medical school in Taipai continue to translate into Chinese.
> There the students translate and than their translations are reviewed by
> their profs before being posted. They translate in groups using hackpad to
> make it more social.

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

Articles about LGBT topics would be great! Similarly topics about important
women in the third world. I would also like a focus on articles about
primary health. Perhaps also agriculture.

I'm not sure if it is wise to move this out into chapters, keep it simple,
but perhaps community groups should be able to make direct feedback.

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 2:04 PM, Lane Rasberry 
wrote:

> Excellent idea.
>
> I have the idea that the WMF invests $10,000 in the developing world to
> recruit $1000 of volunteer labor.
>
> We need to be realistic about the relative costs of doing Western-style,
> rich country outreach in all economies. In the past, the strategy has been
> to fund the recruitment of volunteers and avoid hiring content producing
> staff no matter the outcomes, cost, or impact.
>
> In the spectrum of the average income of individuals in some places, it is
> obviously easier and more impactful to hire someone with a masters degree
> to outright produce content than to pay for a program which will recruit
> volunteers.
>
> Obviously, the WMF cannot and will never pay for content. However, I think
> that we need to make it easier for Wikimedia chapters, community groups,
> and partner organizations to hire paid contributors. Translation is the
> most obvious place to start because having base content in an encyclopedia
> is the foundation for demonstrating the legitimacy and value of Wikimedia
> projects. Funding should go from WMF to chapters to paid staff for content.
>
> To make this project a go we would need to have a conversation about what
> sort of content is a priority for translation. I have a draft of an idea
> for prioritizing content for translation.
> 
> The idea is that for any given field of study, subject matter experts
> identify 99 articles in that field which they deem and come to consensus as
> priorities for having a global conversation in that field. So for example,
> if a group funds translation of LGBT+ content, then we would need to
> develop a canon of LGBT topics to which everyone in the world would have
> access. I have no idea how to choose topics, but fewer than 100 is probably
> not enough and more than 100 is probably too much for an all-languages
> translation project. I could use some help drafting guidelines for how to
> make priorities for what to translate given limited resources.
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 7:51 AM, John Erling Blad 
> wrote:
>
> > This discussion is going to be fun! =D
> >
> > A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles,
> > the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.
> >
> > What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There
> are
> > several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from
> > "List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten
> thousand
> > articles from the expanded list[2].
> >
> > Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about
> $1
> > for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another
> > language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
> > countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks
> > good translation tools.
> >
> > I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as
> > without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community
> at
> > all. By not paying for new articles, and only translating well-referenced
> > articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be avoided.
> Perhaps
> > we should also identify good source articles, that would be a help.
> > Translated articles should be above some minimum size, but they does not
> > have to be full translations of the source article.
> >
> > A real problem is that our existing lists of good articles other projects
> > should have is pretty much biased towards Western World, so they need a
> lot
> > of adjustments. Perhaps such a project would identify our inherit bias?
> >
> > [1]
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_
> > Wikipedia_should_have
> > [2]
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_
> > Wikipedia_should_have/Expanded
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> > wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> > wiki/Wikimedia-l
> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > 
>
>
>
>
> --
> Lane Rasberry
> user:bluerasberry on Wikipedia
> 206.801.0814
> l...@bluerasberry.com
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> wiki/Wikimedia-l
> 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[James Salsman]

>...  make sure people are taking the work seriously and not
> simply using Google translate

People are likely to start with Google Translate whether they are
taking the translation seriously or not, so it would still help if we
could get Google to provide numeric per-word translation confidence
scores.

So please star the request for those at:
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/73830349

Thank you!

Best regards,
Jim

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 7:18 AM, James Heilman  wrote:
> One further case, some of the translations we did into Swahili had funding
> associated with them. Few people in the country have easy access to a
> computer and cellphones are not as suitable for translation work. Basically
> TWB has a brick and mortar translation center in Nairobi with computers.
> They have staff that keep an eye on the center. People were recruited,
> provided instruction, provided access to the computers, and provided cell
> phone credits for their involvement. What they worked on helped them
> develop a CV.
>
> James
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 6:30 AM, James Heilman  wrote:
>
>> Meant to write "more than 5 million words translated". Apologies.
>>
>> James
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 6:26 AM, James Heilman  wrote:
>>
>>> We learned a few things during the medical translation project which
>>> started back in 2011:
>>>
>>> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
>>> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
>>>
>>> 2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP. Thus
>>> we moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the leads of the
>>> English articles.
>>>
>>> 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts more
>>> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that tool
>>> improved further such as having it support specific lists of articles that
>>> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love the
>>> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
>>>
>>> 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
>>> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in which
>>> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian there is
>>> often already at least some content on many of the topics in question. The
>>> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And for
>>> languages in which we have little content there are often few avaliable
>>> volunteers.
>>>
>>> 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
>>> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the work
>>> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so languages
>>> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a second
>>> review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be accepted.
>>>
>>> 6) I hired a coordinator for the translation project for a couple of
>>> years. The translators at TWB did not want to become Wikipedians or learn
>>> how to use our systems. The coordinator created account like TransSW001
>>> (one for each volunteer) and preloaded the article to be translated into
>>> Content Translation. They than gave the volunteer translator the user name
>>> and password to the account.
>>>
>>> 7) Were are we at now? There are currently just over 1,000 leads of
>>> articles that have been improved and are ready for translation. This
>>> includes articles on the 440 medications that are on the WHO Essential
>>> List. We have worked a bit in some 100 languages. The efforts have resulted
>>> in more than 5 million works translated and integrated into different
>>> Wikipedias. The coordinator has unfortunately moved on to his real job of
>>> teaching high school students.
>>>
>>> 8) The project continues but at a slower pace than before. The Wikipedian
>>> and retired orthopedic surgeon Subas Chandra Rout has basically single
>>> handedly translated nearly all 1,000 leads into Odia a language spoken by
>>> 40 million people in Eastern India. The amazing thing is that for many of
>>> these topics this is the first and only information online about it. Google
>>> translate does not even claim to work in this language. Our partnerships
>>> with WMTW and medical school in Taipai continue to translate into Chinese.
>>> There the students translate and than their translations are reviewed by
>>> their profs before being posted. They translate in groups using hackpad to
>>> make it more social.
>>>
>>> I am currently working to re invigorate the project :-)
>>> James
>>>
>>> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 5:51 AM, John Erling Blad 
>>> wrote:
>>>
 This discussion is going to be fun! =D

 A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles,
 the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.

 What if a base set of articles 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[James Heilman]

One further case, some of the translations we did into Swahili had funding
associated with them. Few people in the country have easy access to a
computer and cellphones are not as suitable for translation work. Basically
TWB has a brick and mortar translation center in Nairobi with computers.
They have staff that keep an eye on the center. People were recruited,
provided instruction, provided access to the computers, and provided cell
phone credits for their involvement. What they worked on helped them
develop a CV.

James

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 6:30 AM, James Heilman  wrote:

> Meant to write "more than 5 million words translated". Apologies.
>
> James
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 6:26 AM, James Heilman  wrote:
>
>> We learned a few things during the medical translation project which
>> started back in 2011:
>>
>> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
>> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
>>
>> 2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP. Thus
>> we moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the leads of the
>> English articles.
>>
>> 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts more
>> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that tool
>> improved further such as having it support specific lists of articles that
>> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love the
>> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
>>
>> 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
>> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in which
>> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian there is
>> often already at least some content on many of the topics in question. The
>> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And for
>> languages in which we have little content there are often few avaliable
>> volunteers.
>>
>> 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
>> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the work
>> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so languages
>> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a second
>> review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be accepted.
>>
>> 6) I hired a coordinator for the translation project for a couple of
>> years. The translators at TWB did not want to become Wikipedians or learn
>> how to use our systems. The coordinator created account like TransSW001
>> (one for each volunteer) and preloaded the article to be translated into
>> Content Translation. They than gave the volunteer translator the user name
>> and password to the account.
>>
>> 7) Were are we at now? There are currently just over 1,000 leads of
>> articles that have been improved and are ready for translation. This
>> includes articles on the 440 medications that are on the WHO Essential
>> List. We have worked a bit in some 100 languages. The efforts have resulted
>> in more than 5 million works translated and integrated into different
>> Wikipedias. The coordinator has unfortunately moved on to his real job of
>> teaching high school students.
>>
>> 8) The project continues but at a slower pace than before. The Wikipedian
>> and retired orthopedic surgeon Subas Chandra Rout has basically single
>> handedly translated nearly all 1,000 leads into Odia a language spoken by
>> 40 million people in Eastern India. The amazing thing is that for many of
>> these topics this is the first and only information online about it. Google
>> translate does not even claim to work in this language. Our partnerships
>> with WMTW and medical school in Taipai continue to translate into Chinese.
>> There the students translate and than their translations are reviewed by
>> their profs before being posted. They translate in groups using hackpad to
>> make it more social.
>>
>> I am currently working to re invigorate the project :-)
>> James
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 5:51 AM, John Erling Blad 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> This discussion is going to be fun! =D
>>>
>>> A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles,
>>> the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.
>>>
>>> What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There
>>> are
>>> several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from
>>> "List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten
>>> thousand
>>> articles from the expanded list[2].
>>>
>>> Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about
>>> $1
>>> for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another
>>> language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
>>> countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks
>>> good translation tools.
>>>
>>> I believe 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[James Heilman]

Meant to write "more than 5 million words translated". Apologies.

James

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 6:26 AM, James Heilman  wrote:

> We learned a few things during the medical translation project which
> started back in 2011:
>
> 1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
> extensively improved before being proposed for translation.
>
> 2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP. Thus
> we moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the leads of the
> English articles.
>
> 3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts more
> efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that tool
> improved further such as having it support specific lists of articles that
> are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love the
> tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.
>
> 4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
> Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in which
> their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian there is
> often already at least some content on many of the topics in question. The
> issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And for
> languages in which we have little content there are often few avaliable
> volunteers.
>
> 5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
> significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the work
> seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so languages
> in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a second
> review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be accepted.
>
> 6) I hired a coordinator for the translation project for a couple of
> years. The translators at TWB did not want to become Wikipedians or learn
> how to use our systems. The coordinator created account like TransSW001
> (one for each volunteer) and preloaded the article to be translated into
> Content Translation. They than gave the volunteer translator the user name
> and password to the account.
>
> 7) Were are we at now? There are currently just over 1,000 leads of
> articles that have been improved and are ready for translation. This
> includes articles on the 440 medications that are on the WHO Essential
> List. We have worked a bit in some 100 languages. The efforts have resulted
> in more than 5 million works translated and integrated into different
> Wikipedias. The coordinator has unfortunately moved on to his real job of
> teaching high school students.
>
> 8) The project continues but at a slower pace than before. The Wikipedian
> and retired orthopedic surgeon Subas Chandra Rout has basically single
> handedly translated nearly all 1,000 leads into Odia a language spoken by
> 40 million people in Eastern India. The amazing thing is that for many of
> these topics this is the first and only information online about it. Google
> translate does not even claim to work in this language. Our partnerships
> with WMTW and medical school in Taipai continue to translate into Chinese.
> There the students translate and than their translations are reviewed by
> their profs before being posted. They translate in groups using hackpad to
> make it more social.
>
> I am currently working to re invigorate the project :-)
> James
>
> On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 5:51 AM, John Erling Blad 
> wrote:
>
>> This discussion is going to be fun! =D
>>
>> A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles,
>> the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.
>>
>> What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There are
>> several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from
>> "List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten thousand
>> articles from the expanded list[2].
>>
>> Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about $1
>> for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another
>> language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
>> countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks
>> good translation tools.
>>
>> I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as
>> without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community
>> at
>> all. By not paying for new articles, and only translating well-referenced
>> articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be avoided.
>> Perhaps
>> we should also identify good source articles, that would be a help.
>> Translated articles should be above some minimum size, but they does not
>> have to be full translations of the source article.
>>
>> A real problem is that our existing lists of good articles other projects
>> should have is pretty much biased towards Western World, so they need a
>> lot
>> of adjustments. Perhaps such a 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[James Heilman]

We learned a few things during the medical translation project which
started back in 2011:

1) You must start with high quality content and thus all articles are
extensively improved before being proposed for translation.

2) A lot of languages want "less" content than is present on EN WP. Thus we
moved to just improving and suggesting for translation the leads of the
English articles.

3) The "Content Translation" tool developed by the WMF made efforts more
efficient than handing around word documents. Would love to see that tool
improved further such as having it support specific lists of articles that
are deemed ready for translation by certain groups. Would also love the
tool to have tracking metrics for these types of projects.

4) We used volunteer translators mostly associated with our partner
Translators Without Borders. One issue we found was that languages in which
their are lots of translators such as French, Spanish, and Italian there is
often already at least some content on many of the topics in question. The
issue than becomes integration which needs an expert Wikipedia. And for
languages in which we have little content there are often few avaliable
volunteers.

5) With respect to "paying per word" the problem is this would require
significant checks and balances to make sure people are taking the work
seriously and not simple using Google translate for the 70 or so languages
in which it claims to work. We often had translations undergo a second
review and the volunteers at TWB have to pass certain tests to be accepted.

6) I hired a coordinator for the translation project for a couple of years.
The translators at TWB did not want to become Wikipedians or learn how to
use our systems. The coordinator created account like TransSW001 (one for
each volunteer) and preloaded the article to be translated into Content
Translation. They than gave the volunteer translator the user name and
password to the account.

7) Were are we at now? There are currently just over 1,000 leads of
articles that have been improved and are ready for translation. This
includes articles on the 440 medications that are on the WHO Essential
List. We have worked a bit in some 100 languages. The efforts have resulted
in more than 5 million works translated and integrated into different
Wikipedias. The coordinator has unfortunately moved on to his real job of
teaching high school students.

8) The project continues but at a slower pace than before. The Wikipedian
and retired orthopedic surgeon Subas Chandra Rout has basically single
handedly translated nearly all 1,000 leads into Odia a language spoken by
40 million people in Eastern India. The amazing thing is that for many of
these topics this is the first and only information online about it. Google
translate does not even claim to work in this language. Our partnerships
with WMTW and medical school in Taipai continue to translate into Chinese.
There the students translate and than their translations are reviewed by
their profs before being posted. They translate in groups using hackpad to
make it more social.

I am currently working to re invigorate the project :-)
James

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 5:51 AM, John Erling Blad  wrote:

> This discussion is going to be fun! =D
>
> A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles,
> the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.
>
> What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There are
> several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from
> "List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten thousand
> articles from the expanded list[2].
>
> Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about $1
> for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another
> language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
> countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks
> good translation tools.
>
> I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as
> without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community at
> all. By not paying for new articles, and only translating well-referenced
> articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be avoided. Perhaps
> we should also identify good source articles, that would be a help.
> Translated articles should be above some minimum size, but they does not
> have to be full translations of the source article.
>
> A real problem is that our existing lists of good articles other projects
> should have is pretty much biased towards Western World, so they need a lot
> of adjustments. Perhaps such a project would identify our inherit bias?
>
> [1]
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_
> Wikipedia_should_have
> [2]
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_
> Wikipedia_should_have/Expanded
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[Lane Rasberry]

Excellent idea.

I have the idea that the WMF invests $10,000 in the developing world to
recruit $1000 of volunteer labor.

We need to be realistic about the relative costs of doing Western-style,
rich country outreach in all economies. In the past, the strategy has been
to fund the recruitment of volunteers and avoid hiring content producing
staff no matter the outcomes, cost, or impact.

In the spectrum of the average income of individuals in some places, it is
obviously easier and more impactful to hire someone with a masters degree
to outright produce content than to pay for a program which will recruit
volunteers.

Obviously, the WMF cannot and will never pay for content. However, I think
that we need to make it easier for Wikimedia chapters, community groups,
and partner organizations to hire paid contributors. Translation is the
most obvious place to start because having base content in an encyclopedia
is the foundation for demonstrating the legitimacy and value of Wikimedia
projects. Funding should go from WMF to chapters to paid staff for content.

To make this project a go we would need to have a conversation about what
sort of content is a priority for translation. I have a draft of an idea
for prioritizing content for translation.

The idea is that for any given field of study, subject matter experts
identify 99 articles in that field which they deem and come to consensus as
priorities for having a global conversation in that field. So for example,
if a group funds translation of LGBT+ content, then we would need to
develop a canon of LGBT topics to which everyone in the world would have
access. I have no idea how to choose topics, but fewer than 100 is probably
not enough and more than 100 is probably too much for an all-languages
translation project. I could use some help drafting guidelines for how to
make priorities for what to translate given limited resources.


On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 7:51 AM, John Erling Blad  wrote:

> This discussion is going to be fun! =D
>
> A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles,
> the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.
>
> What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There are
> several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from
> "List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten thousand
> articles from the expanded list[2].
>
> Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about $1
> for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another
> language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
> countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks
> good translation tools.
>
> I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as
> without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community at
> all. By not paying for new articles, and only translating well-referenced
> articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be avoided. Perhaps
> we should also identify good source articles, that would be a help.
> Translated articles should be above some minimum size, but they does not
> have to be full translations of the source article.
>
> A real problem is that our existing lists of good articles other projects
> should have is pretty much biased towards Western World, so they need a lot
> of adjustments. Perhaps such a project would identify our inherit bias?
>
> [1]
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_
> Wikipedia_should_have
> [2]
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_
> Wikipedia_should_have/Expanded
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/
> wiki/Wikimedia-l
> New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> 




-- 
Lane Rasberry
user:bluerasberry on Wikipedia
206.801.0814
l...@bluerasberry.com
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

I should probably say that I don't believe our present "lists of articles
every Wikipedia should have" are really good. I believe the lists should
reflect what people from different places actually reads, or try to read,
but normalized to a global perspective. That is also a necessity if the
purpose is to create local communities in the different languages. Think
globally, act locally!

On Sat, Feb 24, 2018 at 1:51 PM, John Erling Blad  wrote:

> This discussion is going to be fun! =D
>
> A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles,
> the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.
>
> What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There are
> several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from
> "List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten thousand
> articles from the expanded list[2].
>
> Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about $1
> for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another
> language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
> countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks
> good translation tools.
>
> I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as
> without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community at
> all. By not paying for new articles, and only translating well-referenced
> articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be avoided. Perhaps
> we should also identify good source articles, that would be a help.
> Translated articles should be above some minimum size, but they does not
> have to be full translations of the source article.
>
> A real problem is that our existing lists of good articles other projects
> should have is pretty much biased towards Western World, so they need a lot
> of adjustments. Perhaps such a project would identify our inherit bias?
>
> [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_
> every_Wikipedia_should_have
> [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_
> every_Wikipedia_should_have/Expanded
>
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[Wikimedia-l] Paid translation

[John Erling Blad]

This discussion is going to be fun! =D

A little more than seventy Wikipedia-projects has more than 65k articles,
the remaining two hundred or so are pretty small.

What if a base set of articles were opened for paid translators? There are
several lists of such base sets. We have both the thousand articles from
"List of articles every Wikipedia should have"[1] and and the ten thousand
articles from the expanded list[2].

Lets say verified good translators was paid about $0.01 per word (about $1
for a 1k-article) for translating one of those articles into another
language, with perhaps a higher pay for contributors in high-cost
countries. The pay would also have to be higher for languages that lacks
good translation tools.

I believe this would be an _enabling_ activity for the communities, as
without a base set of articles it won't be possible to build a community at
all. By not paying for new articles, and only translating well-referenced
articles, some of the disputes in the communities could be avoided. Perhaps
we should also identify good source articles, that would be a help.
Translated articles should be above some minimum size, but they does not
have to be full translations of the source article.

A real problem is that our existing lists of good articles other projects
should have is pretty much biased towards Western World, so they need a lot
of adjustments. Perhaps such a project would identify our inherit bias?

[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_Wikipedia_should_have
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_every_Wikipedia_should_have/Expanded
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