Alain is writing it.

Massively collaborative sites like Wikipedia are revolutionizing the way we think and deal with content creation. This is bound to have profound impacts on the way that we think and deal with content translation as well (Desilets 2007... this would be my Aslib keynote).

In particular, it raises the question of how to go about collaboratively translating content that is collaboratively created and ever changing. This is a situation that many community-built sites find themselves in. For example, SUMO, the Mozilla Support community... add some stuff here about SUMO.

Translating content in this sort of environment presents a number of unique challenges, compared to translation in more traditional environments (Desilets et al., 2005):

• Impracticality of imposing a master language, and forcing all original contributions to be written first in that language.
• Ever changing nature of the content which may never reach a "final" stage.
• Difficulty of enforcing timely translation into all target languages.
• Non-professional nature of many of the volunteers doing the translations.

In this paper, we describe features that were implemented in the TikiWiki engine, in order to facilitate this sort of collaborative translation of wiki content. These features build heavily on the designs implemented in the LizzyWiki system (Desilets et al., 2005), but they innovate in several ways:

• Support truly mutlingual sites (LizzyWiki only supported bilingual sites).
• Allow original modifications to a page at any point in time (LizzyWiki required that the user first bring the page in synch with other linguistic versions of the same page, before doing any new original changes).
• Implementation in a full-featured wiki engine (LizzyWiki was a proof-of-concept system, and while it had very advanced multilingual support features, it lacked many of the other features that the market has come to expect from a wiki engine).