When a user translates content from one language to another, the GUI should gently constrain him so that he is not tempted to write original new content while doing translation. This ends up screwing things up big time for the translation tracking infrastructure upon which the CLWE depends. But in my experience, people who translate on wiki sites are also people who author original content. And they often switch to an author role while in the process of translating. I have done this many times without realizing it, eventhough I was aware of the issue with translation tracking.

The attached Excel spreadsheet is a mockup of what this GUI might look like. Essentially, it constrains the user to only edit lines on the target language side, for which the corresponding line in the source language has changed.

Note that this is not bullet-proof. Indeed, the user could still make original changes on those lines that need translation. But at least, it minimizes opportunities for this to happen, and also, the constrained format sends a clear message to the translator that he is supposed to only translate, not create original content.

Note also that this assumes we can make a correspondence between lines in source and target language pages. Not clear how hard that is to do, but I think it should be feasible in most cases.

Scenarios of use

Here are various scenarios that look at how this kind of GUI could help, preserve sentence alignment, and where and how automated sentence alignment algorithms could come in handy.

The scenarios are described using a table form. Colums correspond to English, French and Spanish pages. Rows correspond to particular actions done by users. Cr(Si-Sk) means an original creation of sentences i through k. Mod(Si-Sk) means an original modification of the same. Del(Si-Sk) means deletion of the same. Tr(Si-Sk) means translation of the same.

EN	FR	ES	Description
Cr(s1-s100)			An EN author creates a page in English, which has 100 sentences.
	Tr(s1-s30)		A FR translator translates the page. English sentences pasted to the FR side, all of them open for editing.