Re: itemprop="translator"

On Mon, 01 Sep 2014 10:01, Jean-Christophe Lavocat wrote:
> Regarding an author/translator, one might want to know which "content"
has been written by the person. Is there any official way to do that ?

I guess it will only make sense to add a translator tag (or "translator
role") to a text first defined as a translation. Author tag could then be
added to any language version of the text and will then be the one that has
written the original source text of that translation.

I was not aware about the roles pattern used. To simply add "translator" as
a contribution role to the work sounds very logical and would make it
easier to manage for webmasters and to keep overview. However, the
contribution from a translator to the work is in fact really significant
for the person that needs the translation to understand the text. The issue
is not about simply having a list of translators to give them attributions
to a work, but to be able to display who translated a text together with
the specific translation done. It serves an important function: Then if
there are confusions in the text, you can actually contact the translator
to clear up what you don't understand. The translator understand a language
you don't, and you're in fact helpless to understand the original work
without the translator.

Maybe knowing the name of the translator would not make you buy a book, but
would you buy the book at all if it was only written in a language you
didn't understand? I think we can hardly underestimate the importance of
the translator.

A good translator understand a lot about the cultural context both of the
source language/culture and the target language/culture, so there are many
interpretations made for you by the translators that will be transmitted
directly to your understanding of the work. To know who made the
translation can say a lot about the quality of the translation. Culture and
language is really not a 1-1 issue that can be translated word by word and
different translators will often give different translations. Then of
course the creative contribution from a translator to a translation can
differ a lot; in a poem the translator needs to be more poetic and the
translator will probably have a stronger voice in the text, in a legal text
of course the translator will try to avoid having any voice themselves at
all.

On Tue, 02 Sep 2014 01:49, chaals@yandex-team.ru wrote:
> I think the sticking point on translation is about the difference between
identifying the thing translated and the translation, or between noting
that there *is* a translation without specifying which is the original...

Good point! But should this not be integrated with the way different
language versions of a website is declared today? Usually a html document
will declare all language versions of itself in the header with a link like
this to each language version:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="LANGUAGE-CODE" href="LINK">
As far as I understand, there is nothing that indicate what is the original
content (rel="canonical" only indicate that two different html pages have
same content/translation). I guess adding something like
*itemprop="hasTranslation"* or *itemprop="translationOf"* inside these link
tags would help clarify what is the original version, but they would not be
very human readable. What will *translationOf* mean inside the link tag in
the header? That the html document is a translation of the link? Or that
the link is a translation of the html document?

*rel="alternate"* in fact already means an alternative version of the
document, it can be different language version, but also a version with
different style sheet (e.g. for people that need high contrast because of
reduced sight). Maybe what we're actually missing is *rel="source"* or
something similar, to indicate what (language) version is the original one?


2014-09-01 8:44 GMT+02:00 Wallis,Richard <Richard.Wallis@oclc.org>:

> There is not a translator property at the moment, I agree that one would
> be useful along with translationOf/hasTranslation.
>
> These are on my list for potential proposals from the SchemaBibEx group.
>
> ~Richard
>
> On 31 Aug 2014, at 14:44, Mats Blakstad <mats.gbproject@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Does there exist in attribute for translator, like the author attribute?
> > If not, would be great to add that!
>
>
>