History: WS08Paper:Tracking Changes

The primary difference between collaborative translation and traditional translation is that the changes are not controlled. Authors contributing to the documents are not coordinated and are likely not to know each other. Documents are in constant evolution and will never reach a final state. Moreover, in a wiki community, contributions must be allowed in all available languages.

These key differences make all structures used by the traditional translation industry collapse. The top-down approach with staged document approval and translation requests cannot hold. Maintaining a master version is completely out of the question.

To bring collaboration to the translation processes, the tools supporting them must respect the openness allowing wikis to be such powerfull collaboration tools. The freedom to contribute to any page must remain. Change should be embraced rather than constrained. While the translation effort is desired, the availability of multiple languages on the website should not restrain the original content creation.

The different communities contributing to the content of the various linguistic versions must be seen as a whole who can benefit from each other. The current inability to synchronize efforts causes silos to be created. The tools must allow synergy to occur between the communities and help them share knowledge.

To do this properly, the contributions made to the different pages must be tracked properly. With limited resources on some translation pairs, it would be nearly impossible to replicate changes between some languages. To have any chance of success, working around the limited language pairs is necessary.

Breaking the language pair barrier means that content should be available from as many sources as possible to provide translators with decent alternatives and reduce the amount of efforts they will have to provide in order to understand the changes made. To machines, all linguistic versions are distinct pieces of data and they wouldn't know how to map the change in a different context. However, to humans, the idea behind a change is present in the content of any page it has been translated to. Any page that incorporated the idea can be used a source for the given change.

Without tool support, this kind of effort would be possible on small amounts of languages with a lot of discipline by the translators and appropriate use of change comments. However, the error rates would be very high and some changes would be lost along the way.