Re: translation Circus

Dear Gareth,

Although I am not the person at W3C who manages the translations any
more (but I did it for many years), Helen will forgive me, I hope, if I
answer this mail.

I do not want to come back on some of the factual mistakes you made in
your mail on various languages; others have done that already. Let me
reflect on the more general issue instead.

Basically: who should be responsible of choosing which language is
important or not? Who should be responsible for _checking_ the quality
of translations? W3C has, essentially, two choices: either to set up
some very strict rules, thereby reducing dramatically the number of
translations, or to let all of them come and try to filter out the
obvious 'spams' only (there has been some but really not a lot!).

I say 'dramatically reduce the number of translations' because, let us
face it, that would be the result. 'W3C' is not a faceless organization
with infinite possibilities and resources. It is a small team of about
50 people plus, let us say, another 50-80 people with real interest in
internationalization who could, conceivably, use some of their time to
do such checks. But... have you ever checked a translation? I tell you,
as somebody who did it in his youth, it is _very_ tough work. Ie, out of
those 50 + 50-80 people only a few would really accept to do this type
of work... Hence the dramatic reduction.

So, the choice is between two evils. Either reduce the number of
translations or let them come in without any formal linguistic check,
accepting the danger of letting in some whose quality might be less then
desirable. If this is the choice, I am definitely in favour of the
latter. And I am definitely not in position nor, I believe, is anybody
around, to decide _which_ language is acceptable and which is not.

The comparison may be a bit far-fetched, but is is a _little_ bit like
Wikipedia. Yes, Wikipedia does contain lots of errors, mistakes,
misrepresentations. Awful stuff. But the community effect works and I
think we can agree that Wikipedia is immensely useful despite these
issues. I would be pleased to see _this_ mailing list acting as a
friendly and collegial forum where translations errors could be raised
and advise could be given to translators. My experience of the past 4-5
years is that it _does_ work that way although, I admit, more active
cross-checking might be useful sometimes.

Finally, another point. W3C knows that, _in some cases_, the quality of
the translation does matter a lot. This is the example when, for
example, a document is aimed at national legislation. For those purposes
W3C does have a so called 'Authorized W3C Translation' process[1]. As
you can see in [1], that policy tries to define a more formal process
where linguistic checks, like the one you refer to, are done. The
relative complexity of [1] shows that _it is not easy_ to define such a
policy. And, although the policy has been around for quite some time
now, the fact that only one translation falls under that category at the
moment[2] shows that it is also not easy to do that in practice either.
One more sign for my 'dramatic reduction' characterization...

Sincerely

Ivan Herman


[1] http://www.w3.org/2005/02/TranslationPolicy.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/2005/11/Translations/Lists/ListAuth.html


Gareth Edison wrote:
> Good evening everyone here at w3c translations,
>
> As a long time supporter of the W3C project I would like to voice my
> opinion regarding the quality of some of the translations being
> prodiced here on the forum.

> What was supposed to be a good idea ist turning into a fiasco
> of link hungry webmasters posing as translators who are translating
> documents no one really wants or needs. It is certainly helpfull
> to be able to read these Documents in French, Dutch, German.
> Greek, Russian, Cinese or Japanese but I fail to grasp the
> importancy of translating documents into languages like Turmen,
> Uzbek, Azerbajan, Kazakh, Belarussian, Ukrainian, Estonian,
> Latvian, Tatar, Georgian or even Armenian. Imagine Indian
> webmasters translating these documents into some of the 50
> different dialects of Tamil or Sanskrit or how about our
> fellow Chinese webmasters translation their chines documents
> into Shangjainese or Taiwanese.
>
> My question is, where will W3c draw the line?
>
> The Turkish translation below is just one of the results of
> people translating documents into languages they are not
> familiar with. This document was clearly translated into
> Turkish from a Russian translation which is spoiling the high
> standard of work required by W3C in order to produce quality
> translations.
>
> Wouldnt it be much wiser to allow ONLY *native speakers* to
> translate documents for W3C instead of people producing
> translations which they cant read themselves? Maybe W3c
> should start only allowing main languages instead of
> sub-divisions of these languages like the many Russian
> dialects as mentioned above.
>
> Whatever the outcome I wish you all a happy new year
>
> Gareth--

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
PGP Key: http://www.ivan-herman.net/pgpkey.html
FOAF: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf.rdf