History: WS08Paper:Introduction

Source of version: 34

Massively collaborative sites like Wikipedia are revolutionizing the way in which content is created worldwide. This is bound to have profound impacts on the way in which content is ''translation'' as well (Desilets 2007a).

__NOTE FROM AD: In these next few paragraphs, I think it's important to talk mostly about the MOTIVATIONS for wanting to do collaborative translation. We should not talk too much about the CHALLENGES with collaborative, because we will have ample time to talk about those in the rest of the paper. This is our one chance to really catch the reader's attention by talking about why organizations would want to do collaborative translation in the first place __ 

In particular, this raises the question of how best to  collaboratively author and translate content in several languages concurrently, in an organic, continuous fashion. This is a new model of translation which is very attractive for many community-built sites. For example, SUMO the Mozilla Support community, recently switched to a wiki approach to allow communities of volunteers to author the documentation for the Firefox browser. Since they require the content to be translated in at least 8 major languages, they are now faced with the challenge of supporting collaborative translation as well. Other examples of not for profit communities that employ a collaborative translation paradigm can be found in (__TODO: Find the paper from Multilingual Computing that talks about collaborative volunteer translation__).

Collaborative authoring and translation is also becoming increasingly attractive with for-profit organisations. For example, this approach may allow organisations to crowd-source non core translation work to communities of volunteers who care deeply about having a particular content translated in a particular language (minority languages for example). Examples of organisations that use this approach include: __TODO: See if we can find some by googling for crowdsourcing translation__. Even in completely traditional contexts, some teams of professional translators are also finding that this sort of collaborative, organic and agile approach to authoring and translation has definite advantages (_TODO: Find the Multilingual Computing paper that talks about agile, collaborative translation in traditional settings__).

__NOTES FROM AD: Wondering if this next paragraph is redundant with the one that immediatly follows__

In a collaborative context, allowing authors to create original content is crucial. However, when it comes to translation, it causes serious synchronization problems. Moreover, through the crowd sourcing effects offered by wikis, the foundation may be able to propose the documentation in languages that would not have been thinkable in the past. To do so, reliable translation tracking tools are required.

__TODO: LPH wrote some excellent introductory French material in his project report. Use some of it here__

Translating content in these kinds of collaborative environments presents a number of unique challenges, compared to more traditional environments (Desilets et al., 2005). The primary difference is that in a collaborative environment, the process is much less controlled and more "chaotic". Traditional translation processes and tools operate under a number of assumptions which simply do not hold in a collaborative environment. Below is a list of those.

* __Assumption 1 - Master language:__ In a traditional context, original content is typically created in a master language, usually English. This is not realistic in a collaborative context, because not all volunteer authors will be fluent enough in English to write high quality content in that language. 
* __Assumption 2 - Edit freeze:__ In a traditional context, there is a strong tendancy to limit changes to the master language version while translation is still in process. In a collaborative context, content is often in a permanent state of flux, and it is therefore not realistic to freeze it for a period of time to allow for its translation.
* __Assumption 3 - Enforceable timely translation__: In a traditional context, one can assume that timely translation of content can be enforced through contractual or employer-employee obligations. In a collaborative context, this is not possible since translators are often unpaid volunteers working on their own free time.
* __Assumption 4 - Controlled language pairs:__ In a traditional context, there is a tendancy to limit the number of languages to a small list of "core" languages, and to also limit the limit the number of languages pairs (usually to English <-> X where is is any other language in the core list). In a collaborative contetxt, members of the community are usually allowed to create content in whatever language, including minority languages, and translation may occur between any pair of languages.
* __Assumption 5 - Strong coordination__: In a traditional context, the community of authors and translators is a "closed" world, where mostly everyone knows each other, and there is some central authority that coordinates everything. In a collaborative context, authors and translators are not coordinated by any central authority and often do not know each other.
*__Assumption 6 - Trained translators:__ In a traditional context, translators are usually professionallly trained, and can be "enculturated" into the organisation's tools, processes and linguistic norms. In a collaborative context, translators are often amateurs, and the amount of tool, process and linguistic training that can be imposed on them is limited.
*__Assumption 7 - Separation of Authoring and Translation:__ In a traditional environment, authoring and translation are clearly segregated, and there are very little chances for the two to interfere with each other. Authors do not have to know about translation processes and translators do not have to know about the authoring processes. In a collaborative environment, it is difficult to separate those two processes, and the people doing the two are often the same one. As a consequence, there is a risk that introducing a translation process into a wiki community will complexify the basic authoring operations that have made the success of many wiki communities. 


__TODO: Eliminate or merge sentences which are redundant in the argumentation below.__

Thus the main technological challenge of collaborative translation is to come up with tools and processes that do not depend on those assumptions. All these assumptions can be summarized in a few words: change must be embraced rather than constrained. At the same time, the tools need to offer sufficient structure to allow volunteer translators to be effective in their work without obstructing the content authors in their creative processes. With appropriate tool support, they could together reduce the effort required to create and make content widely available.

Such tools would be useful for many communities and organizations. 

In this paper, we describe an approach that addresses the limitations of the tradition model, by relaxing all of these assumptions, sometimes partially, sometimes completely. This enables in effect true collaborative translation. The solution described is implemented in a fully-featured content management system and is ready to be deployed. It allows efficient translation workflows in a collaborative translation environment and can help organizations reduce costs through crowdsourcing. __NOTE FROM AD: I liked the crowdsourcing and cost saving thing better where it used to be. The earlier you talk about cost saving, etc... the better. Also, the way it's written now, the argument about why this is important is split between the second paragraph and this last one. Feels a bit strange.__

To our knowledge, our system is the first one to go this far in supporting collaborative authoring and translation of content, and to be usable in actual production settings.

__TODO : Section summary__

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Sat 12 of Apr, 2008 16:54 GMT alain_desilets	53
Sat 12 of Apr, 2008 16:08 GMT lphuberdeau	52
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Thu 10 of Apr, 2008 15:45 GMT lphuberdeau	30
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