NOTE from AD: Need a better title for this section. Something about removing constraints.

NOTE from AD: On 2008-04-09, I reworked this section in a major way in order to make the argumentation flow better. In the process, I left a lot of content which had originally been written by LPH or AD. I moved this content at the end of this page, so we won't loose it. We should see if we need/can re-thread some of it in the argumentation.

NOTE FROM AD: Need a good vocabulary to describe things. "linguistic variant" to refer to something like "The English version of page X". This is better than using "version" which is ambiguous (it could refer to something like v1.2 of the page versus v1.3 of the page). Also, I used the term "edit" instead of "content element". I think it more correctly describes what it is. We need to make sure we use the vocabulary consistently throughout the paper.

The primary assumption blocking collaborative translation is the assumption of the master language. By forcing all original content to the master language, original contributions to other languages are prevented and all the collaborative aspects of the multilingual wiki are lost.

The solution proposed by the CLWE is to focus on the editing and translation workflow. By keeping track of the original edits and the translation operations between different pages, a complete history of the collaborative effort can be obtained. From this historical data, the original edits contained in each page version and those that have been incorporated in it can be enumerated. From this information, the relationships between pages can be established.

The following subsections detail the notation used to describe the page versions, a sample scenario to explain the functionality and explains some implementation details and their impact on the whole solution.