Wiki-Translation Newsletter #1

Greetings everyone! This month we're kicking off a newsletter series that will highlight significant developments in the Wiki-Translation community.

Our news items today:

1. Great progress & demo video of the Cross-Lingual Wiki Engine Project (CLWE)
2. Marc Laporte to address UN and EU organisations at JIAMCATT
3. Call for Participation: Babel Wiki Workshop on Cross-Language Collaboration

1. News of the Cross-Lingual Wiki Engine Project (CLWE)

There has been a flurry of activity around the CLWE project over that last couple of months. Here we go:

First useful version available

Louis-Philippe Huberdeau has been busily implementing features for collaborative translation in TikiWiki (with significant help from Alain Désilets, Sébastien Paquet, Xavier de Pedro, Nelson Ko and Marc Laporte). We are really happy with how it's turning out, and feel that this first version is already useful as is.

View a demonstration

Rick Sapir has put together a demo screencast that illustrates the central features of the current version:
http://wiki-translation.com/CLWE+Demo+Screencast

Architecture document

An architecture to track changes across translations had to be created for the CLWE project. The architecture aims to allow concurrent modifications of any of the translated pages and track the changes and their propagation. The architecture does not attempt to control the content or to restrict it. However, it can be used to provide information about the state of the translation at any point in time.

Louis-Philippe Huberdeau has written up the details of this architecture in a document titled "Architecture for Collaborative Translation Synchronization". Read it here:
http://wiki-translation.com/tiki-download_wiki_attachment.php?attId=5

Try it out and suggest improvements!

The CLWE code is open source, open content and open development. Are you part of one of the various wiki engine communities? Do you have a potential use case for wikis in translation? We want to hear from you! You can participate to make it better!

You can try out the working version of CLWE code at http://wiki-translation.com. Just create a page for yourself and experiment!

Suggest and discuss potential improvements to the CWLE Project at the forum:
http://wiki-translation.com/forum2

If you want to dig down deeper about the CLWE Project:
http://wiki-translation.com/Cross+Lingual+Wiki+Engine+Project

2. Marc Laporte to address UN and EU organisations at JIAMCATT

In February, Alain Désilets, Marc Laporte and Louis-Philippe Huberdeau met with Olaf-Michael Stefanov, a newly retired former senior officer in the United Nations (UN) translation department. Olaf told us that many UN and European Union agencies are looking for ways to allow volunteers to collaboratively translate material.

Following this meeting, Marc Laporte has been invited to present the Cross Lingual Wiki Engine (CLWE) and TikiWiki at the upcoming computer-assisted translation conference in Tunis, 23-25 April. There will be approximately 150 participants, representing international organizations and European transnational bodies.

The International Annual Meeting on Computer-Assisted Translation and Terminology (JIAMCATT) provides its partners with a forum for debate, exchange of expertise and cooperation in the fields of computer-assisted terminology and translation, interpretation and documentation retrieval.

Marc will be giving a presentation as part of the "Content management systems (technical aspects)" session. He will also demonstrating TikiWiki, with its new multilingual features, page staging and approval, and general wiki/groupware functionality.

3. Call for Participation: Babel Wiki workshop on Cross-Language Collaboration

A workshop proposal on cross-language collaboration has been submitted to the 2008 International Symposium on Wikis, which will be held in Porto this September. The goal of this workshop is to explore how wikis and the wiki way might impact, and be influenced by, multilingual collaboration and language work. It aims to bring together people with an interest in multilingual collaboration, as well as specialists such as translators and terminologists, and authors who hope to find ways for their work to reach other language communities.

The workshop invites full and short papers as well as position papers. Although the workshop has not yet been formally accepted, we are pushing out the Call for Participation now to enable people to prepare contributions in time for the submission deadlines (papers: May 3rd; position papers: June 7th).

Find the call for participation here (A Spanish version is coming soon):
English version: http://is.gd/5to
Version française: http://is.gd/5tr