Bilingual Wiki Work
Much of my work the past few months has been in multilingual settings. I have been attentive to online interactions that include the possibility that English-only is not the only way to go. I think it might be good to start pointing to examples of multilingual distributed interactions and collaborations.
Seb Paquet has started a bilingual planning wiki for a Montreal social software conference.
What I'm wondering is are people translating their own stuff? When they find stuff in only one language left by others, are they voluntarily translating it? I'm curious about the process.
Here is one snippet that shows me the group also has questions:
Je propose que nous fassions deux Wiki, un anglais, un français à partir de maintenant, alors que la base de la base est en place. Rien ne nous empêcherait d'aller voir ce qui s'écrit de l'autre coté. I suggest the creation from now on of two wikis - one french one english - that we would mix from sometimes and we could look the other side anyway to check both evolutions. Its too heavy this way.
Maybe Seb or someone participating will leave us a comment or two. Si vous plait. (I don't speak French. I can handle Portuguese and some Spanish. Other than that I know 2-4 words in quite a few other languages!)
I propose that we create a single wiki, which could have multiple pages in French and English as we like it, peacefully existing alongside one another (just like Montrealers). Care should be taken to link related pages across languages. / Je propose qu'on se dote d'un seul wiki, à pages multiples en français et en anglais à notre convenance, existant pacifiquement côte à côte. Il faudra veiller à faire des liens entre les pages au contenu relié. -- Seb Paquet ++
posted by Nancy White at 10:57 AM
5 Comments:
I don't have any experience of bilingual Wikis yet but we went through a long discussion process before setting up the europa.* multilingual set of newsgroups, and decided to go for an approach which to some sounds anarchic - any languages are allowed to be used, even within one thread. Not sure if that would transpose onto a wiki, but for the website it was a case of using as many translations as anybody was willing to provide.
Worth a quick look, even if it's only to discover that , as a portuguese and english speaker you can understand written interlingua fairly well.
http://www.europa.usenet.eu.org/
Andy, thanks for the link. I'll go take a peek
I was reminded (while playing on Furl.net today) that I have been interested in this stuff for a while. I helped write a chapter on it in 2000. I am not sure I'd agree with everything in that chapter today, but hey, that's what learning is all about.
http://otis.scotcit.ac.uk/onlinebook/otisT601.htm
Andy, I pulled some things off that site as they are relevant here... I hope that is OK?
Europa.* is a multilingual hierarchy, i.e. messages are allowed in any language in use in Europe. There is no 'reference language' on europa.* and multilingual threads are encouraged. Every document is published in as many languages as possible. If you consider that some document is missing a translation in a special language, you can send a message to the steering group at: contact@europa.usenet.eu.org and, much better, propose a translation of your own. :-)
Posting Guidelines.
There are some words of advice on posting to europa.* groups, with particluar reference to multilingualism in the intro and FAQ document
Interlingua.
Interlingua is paneuropean language that was designed by a team of linguists to be comprehensible for a maximum amount of people. It appears alongside English on this website and is also used for the group names. You may see some people posting articles in Interlingua on the newsgroups as well as French, English, Italian, German and Polish already.
1.3. How do we manage such multilingual threads without confusion ?
First of all, you should inform other people about the languages you understand (even when you are not fluent in writing them). You are therefore advised to state it clearly in your posts. For example, these languages can be put in your signature, using the (iso-639) two-letters international codes, ftp://dkuug.dk/i18n/ISO_639 like in the example below :
John Doe [ia,en,fr,de,nl,es,it,ru,pl,dk].
Depending on your newsreader specifications, you can also create the header [X-Accept-Language: ] with the same iso-639 language codes. When starting a new subject, you may wish to indicate the preferred language codes in the subject header. However, this will not prevent anyone from replying in other languages, and may well become inaccurate as the thread progresses. On the other hand, it may be useful for people attempting to filter out messages they are unable to read. Conventions may vary from group to group so look at the existing threads before starting a new one.
1.4. What's this strange language used for groups names ?
It is Interlingua. When creating europa.*, it appeared not to be a good idea to mix european languages in the names of newsgroups, nor putting them in one language (English or another one), since that would have compromised the principles of multilinguism and language neutrality.
Instead, newsgroups names are borrowed from Interlingua, a paneuropean language that was designed by a team of linguists to be comprehensible for a maximum amount of people (see http://www.interlingua.com/ ). These are clean, non-arbitrary international forms that almost everybody understands at first sight, no matter which european language they speak.
During the third RFD (Request for Discussion) for the creation of europa.*, Martijn Dekker wrote a "rationale for the use of Interlingua for the names of the europa.* groups" that is to be found on: http://www.europa.usenet.eu.org/interlingua.html
1.5. But newsgroups descriptions lines are not in Interlingua ?
No, they are not indeed. By the way, it appeared that a few newsgroups names in Interlingua were difficult to understand to some people. Therefore, rather than in Interlingua, descriptions lines of newsgroups are multilingual, with a restriction to the languages most representative for each of the linguistic (sub)families, due to lack of space on a 80-characters line.
For more about the newsgroups descriptions line see: http://www.europa.usenet.eu.org/gn-desc.htm#gnds-eng
3.1. Language
As stated above (see 1.3.), you are advised to state clearly in your posts what languages you can understand, even if you are not fluent in writing them. On the other hand, when answering, please do your best to use a language you are aware the previous sender understands.
3.2. Cultural differences and xenophobia
Discussion about the cultural diversity of the different european nationalities is a natural topic for many europa.* groups but please be sensitive to the people who may be reading and avoid making any remarks which could be received as racist or xenophobic.
When confronted with overtly xenophobic or racist posts, you are advised *not* to answer but, if their sender can be identified, to lodge a complaint against him with his internet provider's abuse service (abuse@ISP.name) with a copy of complete headers of offending posts. And, of course, put this lovely guy in your kill-file.
3.3. Crossposts and followup-to:
Should an article be on topic in several newsgroups, a crosspost on these groups can be done, provided that a followup-to is put on one newsgroup only, with an indication of it in the body of the message. This is true inside europa.* hierarchy and also for crossposts with newsgroups belonging to other, national or linguistic, hierarchies, so that they are not imposed articles written in another tongue than their own.
Right now it seems that those who can, translate their own words. (Most Montreal bloggers are bilingual.) I think there may have been one instance of someone translating someone else's words.
You may be interested in poking around communitywiki.org. In particular there are a bunch of relevant links at http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/community/MultilingualCommunication
Also maybe of interest: http://topicexchange.com/t/multilingual_blogging/
Oh yeah, and go to http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/community/MultilingualExperiment
and play with the checkboxes at the bottom. It's slick.
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