[open-humanities] TEXTUS Translations

[David Clark]

Another (supplementary) approach to this could be to annotate existing
public domain translations. Users could identify important or problematic
passages and annotate them to provide language-based commentary, alternate
translations, the original-language passage, etc.

David

On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 12:17 PM, Sam Leon <sam.leon at okfn.org> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> One of the use cases that has been discussed for TEXTUS is translation.
>
> This was initially envisaged as side-by-side collaborative translation,
> much like side-by-side collaborative transcriptions. The end product of
> this translation process would be a new openly licensed translation
> discoverable through TEXTUS.
>
> There are various problems with this model. As translations can be
> approached in such different ways it is difficult to collaborate widely on
> them given that authors will have differing ideas about how faithful or
> transparent their translations should be. Unlike transcriptions there is no
> 'right or wrong' translation and as such it might be harder to crowd source
> them. You could easily get the scenario where any instance of TEXTUS filled
> up with lots of partial translations each taking a different approach but
> none ever getting finished.
>
> How you would manage all the many partial translations of varying quality
> would become a big issue. I'm not sure that I would want them all to be
> discoverable as separate texts through TEXTUS. I think this would dilute
> the quality of the content and risk losing the faith of the scholarly
> community a given instance of TEXTUS was targeted at.
>
> One idea that came up at the first user requirements workshop was to have
> a class of annotations that were translations. A user could highlight a
> section of text and write a translation of it that could be reviewed and
> searched by others interested in partial or full translations of a given
> work.
>
> The beauty of this would be that there would no longer be the problem of
> having to treat translations as a new class of texts. It would support
> people doing bits of translations at a time, and looking at the work of
> others, without necessarily forcing these fragmentary translations
> together. On this model TEXTUS could of course be a useful tool for those
> wanting to collaborate on full translations of a work but a new full text
> would not have to be the end product.
>
> It would also be very interesting to look at the different approaches
> translators had to a given section of text. You could pick a section of
> text and bring up all the various translation annotations, or a sub-set of
> them, that had been done on a given section. Of course, some thought would
> need to go into how translation annotations would be displayed alongside
> one another as they would be longer than many other types of annotation.
>
> It would be great to hear people's thoughts on this idea and if anyone
> knew of systems that currently do this kind of thing.
>
> Regards,
>
> Sam
>
> --
> Sam Leon
> Community Coordinator
> Open Knowledge Foundation
> http://okfn.org/
> Skype: samedleon
>
>
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>
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