[open-humanities] TEXTUS Translations

Sat Feb 25 20:30:18 UTC 2012

Hi Sam,

The requirements you gave us let me think that you could be interested in our project called "TraduXio".

Its design is explained in this paper:
  http://publications.tech-cico.fr/316a93a7d5280e99f1c696309a00bf49

The software is open-source and we are currentlty looking for user communities and partners.
  http://traduxio.hypertopic.org/

Regards,

Aurélien Bénel
Maître de conférences en informatique
Technologies pour la coopération, l'interaction et les connaissances dans les collectifs
ICD/Tech-CICO, STMR (UMR CNRS), Université de technologie de Troyes
http://benel.tech-cico.fr/

Le 25 févr. 2012 à 20:17, Sam Leon a écrit :

> open-humanities mailing list
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> _______________________________________________
> 
> 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