History: Possible Research Questions

Starting September 2008, Marta Stojanovic and Alain Désilets of the National Research Council of Canada will start a 12 month R&D effort around CLWE.

As many of you know, choosing a good research question is very difficult task, so please help us by reading the possible ideas below, providing comments, and rating them. A good research question is one for which:

• The answer is not known already, and cannot be found easily.
• The answer matters and has large practical consequences for a particular community.

Thx for your help. We are aiming to choosing one of them by mid-september.

BTW: When you rate ideas, make sure you make your own mind and write your answer down before looking at ratings from other folks.

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Q1: What is the current state of collaborative translationpractices and technologies?

Description

There are lots of sites that are doing collaborative translation, and many technologies that are used to support them. A partial list can be found here:

• Relevant sites and resources

At this point in time, nobody seems to have a good handle on everything that is happening. It would be good to write a good synthesis of what is happening.

For example, we could write a survey that analyzes the different communities and tools in terms of the extent to which they operate without relying on the Assumptions of conventional translation processes.

Why is this question important?

This is important so we know what has been done already, so we can figure out what the important unresolved problems are, and can focus on solving those instead of re-inventing the wheel.

What makes this a research question?

This is not hardcore quantitative research, but it it falls in the category of qualitative research. It will involve gathering information, writing and analysing surveys, and synthesizing the information into a big picture.

Proposal assessment

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