It's true that shutting down such service which was based essentially on work made by a large worldwide community is a bad sign. At least Twitter should release all their current efforts in an open-sourced repository with an open licence without commercial restrictions, possibly with attribution (BSD-like, CC-BY) or with some basic share-alike or copyleft requirements (ODbL, CC-BY-SA, GPL, LGPL), or left completely free (CC-0, Public domain, WTFPL). Shutting down the service compeltely and reasing the data would be an insult to those that participated and from which Twitter benefited a lot.
We can understand that Twitter no logner wants to support it directly itself and wants to save some costs, but there are certainly interesting data to keep which could be reused in a possibly larger project as a translation memory and corpus useful for many other free (of commercial) translation engines. It's up to Twitter to choose their opensource repository provider (such as GitHub), make the decessary licencing requirements, and possibly open a competition to transfer the administration of the project to some organized open groups (if the project does not have to be left in readonly with no further development and can be resurrected by independant groups creating their own branches or integrating the data in their own corpus). For that, Twitter should ask their community about the pros and cons of several candidate licences. And may be Twitter will continue to be able to profit from the resurrected or derivated projects (but it will jsut no longer be alone to use it). 2017-11-25 17:37 GMT+01:00 Samuel Klein <[email protected]>: > An inquiry from a friend, about a parallel translator community. > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: "Amy Johnson" <[email protected]> > > > As of November 30, 2017, Twitter is shuttering its Translation Center. > Since 2011, the Translation Center has been a collaborative project, a > public endeavor that has brought together volunteer translators from around > the world. These translators have made Twitter accessible for millions of > others. With the closure of the Translation Center, the specifics of their > work -- the long debates, the compromises, the new challenges -- are about > to vanish. > > Why should we care? There are a lot of reasons. Their work is magnificent > and deserves to be recorded in history, not quietly erased. Their work (and > similar) challenges major theories of translation, opening fresh > possibilities for better and different translation in the future. > (Translation studies scholars are enormously excited -- see, e.g. Miguel A. > Jiménez-Crespo's body of work on Facebook). > > At the moment, a few -- very few -- pages from the Translation Center are > already archived in the Internet Archive. Unfortunately, there's so much > missing, from so many languages. I'm hoping that the translator community > might change that. unfortunately ever since Nov 1 they've only been > allowing public access to people who had already established accounts, so I > can't discuss this directly on the site. > > Do any of you know of people who have worked with the Translation Center > who might be interested in such? Or have an alternative suggestion about > how I could access the site to propose this project? > > Thanks in advance! > > Best, > Amy > > --- > @shrapnelofme > > > > _______________________________________________ > Translators-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/translators-l > >
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