proposal for distributed translation methodology
Following my last post which centred around my English translation of a piece in Japanese, I thought I'd describe some ideas for a methodology which I hope might facilitate and incentivise widespread translation of writing across the blogosphere as envisaged by the Global Voices initiative. I've talked to Ethan, Joi, Patrick and Rebecca in the globalvoices IRC chat channel at various times over the last few weeks, and the idea of finding some way of getting this to happen, along with the challenge of discovering interesting and relevant writing across languages, has been a recurring theme.
It seems to me that translation of other people's foreign-language blog writings within our own blogs could be a natural extension of our standard blogging practices of partial quotation and complete replication of others' posts (given a sufficient ability to understand and translate the source language, of course!). Our incentive in each case is variously to amplify, enrich, respond to and/or re-contextualise the original piece within our own space—which naturally entails (usually) using our own first language.
del.icio.us and Flickr help us to create community value while at the same benefitting us as individuals. Similarly, including translations within our blogs not only benefits our readers by giving them access to timely information and creative writing beyond the boundaries of their own language(s), but also benefits us for the same reason: we gain a niche in the blogosphere which is that much more unique.
The possibilities for cross-cultural collaboration and knowledge-exchange utilising distributed translation across the blogosphere are surely enormous.
And aside from that, it just feels great for me to imagine a bridge, however slender, between Japan and the English-speaking world (in my case)! I love Japanese culture, and it pains me to witness the clichés about Japan that continue to abound in the West simply because swathes of Japanese language-mediated culture (including the Japanese-language blogosphere) remain almost completely untranslated. I'm sure that, to varying degrees, the same is true for so many other cultures whose first language is not English.
Here, then, are some ideas for a provisional set of mechanisms we could employ to get the distributed translation ball rolling. It's written concisely for a technically-savvy audience, but could be expanded into a more approachable "how-to" piece:
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proposal for distributed translation methodology
1) Find a blog post in your source language of choice that interests you sufficiently to translate and blog about it.
2) Check the blog or post for a Creative Commons license that allows derivative works; in the absence of such a license, request permission to translate the post from its author (and perhaps suggest they might like to add a C.C. license to their blog!).
3) Translate the post or an excerpt from it and create a post in your own blog that displays the original text (with permalink to its source) followed by your translation (I chose to additionally indent both using the "blockquote" html tag).
4) Add any additional commentary or response of your own as you would around a quotation written in your main language.
5) Optionally add "(translation)" (in the target language) to the title of your post to facilitate tracking of posts containing translated material in search services like Technorati.
6) Publish your post and open the permalink for it.
7) Create a bookmark in del.icio.us for your post and tag it to express both the subject(s) of the post and the fact that it is a translation between two particular languages. So this latter needs to express the following concept: [source language]+[target language]+["translation"].
So I tagged my Japanese-English translation as "japanese>english" (I also tagged it "和英翻訳", which worked fine in del.icio.us, but my newsreader wouldn't read the resultant RSS feed; it looks like multi-character-set tagging will have to wait for an evolution of our tools).
"japanese>english" is possibly not ideal, and it might be that better tags emerge in time. The rule might be to use a tag established by others unless you have a strong feeling you have a better idea or there is no pre-existing tag (which is the case for Japanese-English to my knowledge).
8) Hack into your blog template (if you are confident to do this!) some JavaScript from a service such as feed2JS that displays the RSS feed from a del.icio.us tag (either your bookmarks with the tag or all bookmarks with the tag) within your blog sidebar. This will allow your readers to track your translations and those of others between your chosen pair(s) of source and target languages from within your blog and easily to find the RSS feed for those streams of content.
9) Don't worry if you can't do (8), as people can still track your translations in your main blog feed and the tag feeds within del.icio.us.
10) That's it!
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I'd love some feedback!
5 Comments:
This is a GOOD IDEA.
Hi Luke,
Tim Oren and I were discussing how to mark this kind of thing up well in machine/human readable form.
I and 'Lewy14' have started a discussion on minimal technical infrastructure to facilitate translated posts on my blog, with input from Kevin and now others. Looks good for doing something low rent just to indicate translated posts, with later expansion to facilitate what we're calling 'Rosetta bots' - crawlers that pick up translations for aiding further human or machine translations. A lot of focus on Arabic and Farsi, since this was also inspired by Global Voices, particularly the ITM brothers and Hoder, but if it won't handle Japanese as well it's broken!
If we can get a convergence in a couple weeks, the next logical steps include easy support in common blog authoring tools, human translator networks as you discuss, Rosetta bots themselves, and getting cheap access to machine translation to supplement the limited number of bilingual folks.
Interesting stuff...
Microschemas would certainly seem to be a potentially fruitful approach to the distributed translation challenge.
I guess what I wanted to communicate in my post was the way in which translation on blogs is also just an extension of what we do already in our blogging. So particular bloggers might get known for providing a translation window into a particular topic area or areas, and for the quality (or otherwise) of their translation.
Topics and quality are subjective, not objective attributes, which is why I feel the fluid, neural-network like behaviour of the blogosphere and free-tagging services like delicious can nicely complement the kind of pre-structured meta-data you are discussing in facilitating distributed translation across blogs.
This is a cool idea. Yet, I've always thought of translation as much more complex than this. One needs amazing facility in two languages, a facility that can capture tone and nuance. Also, when I think of translation, I also think of the problems that occur simply when communicating in one language: users of the same language do not necessarily mean the same things when they speak. Multiple levels of meaning are usually present and these different levels are collapsed or eliminated to the degree to which speakers share a context or dialogue. For example, my partner understands my jokes and references better than my students do. But, even with those close to us, there are always misunderstandings, interpretations that arise out of our own fantasies and insecurities that then distort what we hear or read. So, was the email I received from a friend terse because he was irritated with me or losing interest in our discussion? Or was he just busy? These little examples from interpersonal world are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the larger histories, references, and metaphors informing and flowing through different languages.
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