[okfn-discuss] Open Science Tranlsations

Tue Sep 16 23:04:36 UTC 2008

Excellent points. As open access can bring knowledge to people that
speak the same language, so can it bridge the gap between languages.

Two practical considerations that may help this effort progress are
licensing and software.

What license terms are relevant? Is translation considered a
derivative work, and if so, what licenses can be recommended for those
interested in seeing their content translated?

What software and techniques can be used? Even if many people are
willing to contribute, it is important to find ways to efficiently
accomplish the goal.

I am not very familiar with current translation systems, but one
method I am aware of uses sentence fragments to speed translation.

Applied to scientific papers, this can increase translation
productivity in that common libraries can be applied to a given paper,
and then expanded by contributors for fragments that are specific to
an area of science, or even that particular paper.

Doing some searching brought up this list of open-source translation
software, it might be a good starting point for investigation:
http://opentranslation.aspirationtech.org/index.php/Open_Source_Translation_Tools

Also, this might be interesting thing to bring up on the OKFN open
science dlist.

Thanks for the insightful post,
-Mike

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 8:43 PM, Patrick Primate <patprimate at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello, my name is Patrick Welch. I am a masters student in Clinical
> Psychology at the University of Regina. I'm curious if anyone has
> heard of any open science / open knowledge service or effort to
> translate journal articles and other research to other languages? I am
> a native English speaker, and English is said to be the dominant
> language of science, but much of the English knowledge and research is
> unavailable to the non-English speaking world. Just as importantly,
> research and articles published in non-English languages are
> unavailable to the English speaking world. This is a large barrier for
> open science / open knowledge for a number of obvious reasons.
>
> I can imagine a blissful scenario in which one has a choice of
> language when one downloads an article or some other research. Of
> course this may be improbable to do 'Officially' (the original authors
> may not be able to translate directly into other languages and
> publishers may not be able to afford the translation costs). But
> perhaps some sort of collaborate open science / open knowledge
> endeavor could produce 'unofficial' or 'quasi-official' translations.
> This could be done in a number of ways (e.g., a wiki-like system for
> collaborative editing/translating, with an export to pdf/odt/etc..for
> download).
>
> Although this issue may become easier to deal with as more 'free'
> forms of open access come to dominate (something that certainly will
> take some time) in the current atmosphere I don't know if we would be
> legally allowed to do this. Does anyone know if the publishers would
> sue if we start collaboratively translating articles? Has anyone heard
> of any projects like this?
>
> Any feedback will be appreciated :)
>
> Thank you very much,
>
> Patrick Welch
>
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