Wikipedia translation: Collaborativity,

translation and the web

Mark Shuttleworth

UCL

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Why study Wikipedia translation – and how?

� this presentation proposes possible methods for collecting raw data for researching this complex new type of translation

� the aim is not only to identify where the translated material is located but – more significantly – also what the factors are that determine the likelihood of particular content being translatedtranslated

� the ensuing research can focus on a wide range of topics within the three broad areas of product, process and function

� an open question to research: in what ways is Wikipedia translation a kind of collaborative translation?

� using Wikipedia to study Wikipedia: an extravagant amount of information is available

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Wikipedia and Wikipedia translation

� complex structure of Wikipedia: page anatomy, hierarchies of articles, cross references, metadata, editorial structure, etc.

� Wikipedia as an ‘evolving continuity’ (Meta:Translate Extension 2014)

� the Wikipedian translation landscape is also surprisingly complex: translation can be ad hoc (i.e. self-motivated), semi-organised (i.e. guided) or organised (i.e. part of a project)

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organised (i.e. guided) or organised (i.e. part of a project)� lack of clarity as to the amount, nature and location of

translated material: before you can study it you need to find it� ST and TT both ‘moving objects’ – content does not stay still

over time� untangling the joint evolution of a pair (or group) of articles

can be extremely complex…� … yet is a prerequisite for studying other aspects of Wikipedia

translation

Wikipedia translation vs. collaborative

translation

� Wikipedia as a ‘massively collaborative environment’ (Cross Lingual Wiki Engine Project Proposal n.d.)

� Wikipedia translation as a special case of collaborative translation

� collaborative structure: needs to be researched

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The Wikipedia research ecosystem

� For the translation researcher Wikipedia itself offers what is almost a complete, self-contained research ecosystem in a single site:

� (potential) STs and TTs in 288 languages

� also annotated drafts, comments and discussion, translation guidelines and requests, statistics and analysis

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guidelines and requests, statistics and analysis

� information on and access to the translators themselves as well as full records of their activity, and so on

� all draft versions remain accessible (along with everything else): a virtual archive!

The Book of Lists…

Lists on Wikipedia

� Lists of people from Quebec by region

� Lists of hospitals in Oceania

� Lists of Star Trek planets

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� Lists of Star Trek planets

� Lists of vampires

� … taken from the ‘List of lists of lists’ article (seriously)

Templates

� Wikipedia templates can be used, e.g. to flag an article as a stub or to indicate that it has issues

� a template is a short string of characters added to an article that is rendered as a text box

� e.g. ‘{{translated page|ja|堀越二郎}}’ is displayed as

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Anatomy of an article

Talk page

Page history

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Interwikis

Using page history to identify translated content

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� acts of translation are often flagged, and are sometimes apparent through sudden jumps in size

Using page history to identify translated content

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� versions from different dates can be compared to pin-point precise differences

Using talk pages to identify translated content

� talk pages are used to discuss all kinds of question to do with content, including translation

� sometimes the presence of – or need for – translation is flagged by the presence of a template:

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Using the articles themselves to identify

translated content

� sometimes an article is also flagged in a similar way:

� putative translation pairs can also be spot-checked

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� putative translation pairs can also be spot-checked manually, e.g. via interwiki links, although this is a fairly painstaking approach

‘Pages translated from…’

� in tandem with the page history and talk pages, Wikipedia provides automatically generated lists of pages translated from different language versions:

� https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pages_translated_from_Russian_Wikipedia

� https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pages_translated_from_

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� https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pages_translated_from_Chinese_Wikipedia

� all such pages listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Translated_pages

� in practice the articles listed may only contain a small amount of translated material

‘Articles needing translation from…’

� also automatically generated on the basis of the presence of the relevant template:

� https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_needing_translation_from_Russian_Wikipedia

� https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_needing_translation_from_Chinese_Wikipedia

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tion_from_Chinese_Wikipedia

� all such pages listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_needing_translation_from_foreign-language_Wikipedias

� such lists can show us, for example, what the priorities are of a particular SL Wikipedia community

Generalising one’s findings: categories and

grading scheme

� it’s possible that material identified as translation tends to belong to particular categories (culture, geography, history, etc.: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents/Categories)

� or to particular grades of article (featured article, start, stub, etc.: see

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stub, etc.: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Grading_scheme)

� alternatively, maybe other factors are more important? (E.g. controversiality; currency; relative status of SL and TL; etc.)

Conclusions

With the above approaches we can

� track translation (pages translated from), desired translations (translations needed from) and routes of influence (interwikis) – not all relevant to translation studies

� discover the many factors determining the likelihood that

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� discover the many factors determining the likelihood that translation will be used to produce a particular language version of a certain article

� ascertain the kind of translation and translation-related phenomenon that can be found on Wikipedia (e.g. strategies and procedures; types of translated and hybrid text)

References

� Cross Lingual Wiki Engine Project Proposal (n.d.) Available at http://www.wiki-translation.com/Cross+Lingual+Wiki+Engine+Project+Proposal(accessed 21st August 2014).

� Meta:Translate Extension (2014) Available at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Translate_extension, date

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http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Translate_extension, date updated 3rd April 2014 (accessed 27th August 2014).

Thank you very much!

m.shuttleworth@ucl.ac.uk

https://ucl.academia.edu/MarkShuttleworth

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