Work in progress

It is useful for the users of a wiki translation system to be able to know how much a given translation is up-to-date with respect to other-language versions of the same page which may feature modifications that have not propagated.

In full generality, more than one page may be a source of changes. Let us first consider the case where there are only two languages for a given page. There are many different ways to compute a "translation metric" between two pages. Given a source version S and a target version T, let us agree that the translation metric between them is zero when T is empty, and one (or 100%) when nothing in S needs translation into T.

Computing a translation metric in the CLWE architecture

Huberdeau's translation syncing architecture (Architecture Description (PDF)) provides two sources of input that could feed into a translation metric. The first is the set of content elements that have been introduced elsewhere in the translation set, but have not yet been propagated to the translation under consideration. Since the content elements have labels but not explicit representations in this architecture, what can be derived from them is a number of changes that need to be propagated.

The second source of input is the content diff that is computed to enable an update between two translations. The diff represents the changes requiring propagation as text segments that were removed or added. Obviously, an empty diff would correspond to a metric of 100%. Content diffs have the advantage of providing strings of characters whose length give an approximate measure of required effort.

Let us use diff+(s,t) to represent the total number of characters in the

M(s,t) = ( diff+(s,t) + diff-(s,t)/N ) / Len(??)



where N is a fudge factor representing the ratio of effort between translating a chunk of text into and removing it from a translation (Does N=10 seem reasonable?).

Because the content diff sometimes includes changes that are already present, the above is a conservative measure. In some cases the actual translation effort required may be less than reflected in the metric.