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Voices from Open Translation Tools 2007
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- Voices from Open Translation Tools 2007, Zagreb, Croatia
- In late November 2007, 40 people met in Zagreb for the first time as a community of open translation practitioners.
- Coming from 25 countries and speaking over 50 languages, these developers, translators and content producers
- addressed the translation needs of the free culture movement, and cast visions for the future of open translation tools.
- You guys are making sure that everybody here speaks to everybody else
- as opposed to hanging out with their friends.
- This event is, for me, a huge learning experience.
- The main point is that I'm just not sitting down receiving stuff all the time,
- kind of like you receive stuff from TV all the time.
- I'm like really in action. I'm involved. There was also involvement with creating the agenda with the sticky pads
- and everybody generating the sticky pads and then coming to the board together,
- and again, through movement, creating clusters of things that would end up being agenda items,
- I mean, to me it's just -- it's just -- you know what? It's just so interactive.
- It's very counter-intuitive because you would think it's a geek conference
- so there should be more widgets, but you guys are saying, no. No widgets.
- It's really all first and foremost about people.
- The event is a great opportunity for me to meet other developers of tools that help translate open source
- and open content in general.
- The complete openness of the whole event itself -- the way it's been set up is very inviting.
- What I want to look at is how can we use both technology and human ingenuity,
- which our community is full of, to try to, if not solve, then alleviate this issue
- and broaden access into not just the finished products of who can read them,
- but also who can participate in the processes for discussion, for decision-making, for governance.
- The biggest challenge in terms of developing open-source translation tools
- is that most of the tools are developed by programmers
- who don't really understand what needs to happen in the translation process.
- And I think the hardest part -- and I'm a developer of those tools -- is to actually step back
- and spend time listening to the problems that people have before trying to solve them.
- So trying to understand what are the issues that people are dealing with,
- and then try and translate that into functionality and a tool.
- I'm hoping that when I leave this, so far, very interesting event here on Saturday night
- basically I will know a lot more about what I need to consider when planning open-content projects.
- Why open content?
- The beautiful thing about open content and open source is that you can never know to which heights
- other people will decide to take your content or your software.
- To me, it's a great way to make sure that we communicate with each other
- as opposed to having everything filtered through like either a screen or -- you know -- a corporation.
- The digital world is just providing us the unique opportunity which humankind never had before,
- so everybody with a little investment, like having a computer and a link,
- can have the access to all of the intellectual heritage you can imagine.
- I think open content and open source is the way how people improve each other's lives.
- For maximum reach, which is essentially the end goal, open content is the only way to go
- because it just enables so many different forms of distribution,
- and it enables people to translate without having to ask for permission.
- My passion for open content and open source is just driven by the fact that I've kind of grown into this community.
- I started using open source software.
- I think at one stage I stepped back and realized this is amazing!
- I've got all this software for nothing, and other people have contributed to that.
- I think that was my introduction into actually contributing something back,
- but what is the one little thing that I can do?
- And that's how I got into translation. And I think it's a natural process to then see open content
- and see, well, if software can do so much for someone and get people involved, what could open content do,
- and how much could that open knowledge and access to knowledge to many, many more people.
- I think it's important to have an alternative to commercial content
- so that individuals can communicate with each other across borders,
- across idealogies, across different political affiliations
- and it doesn't go through the typical processes of editors and gatekeepers.
- I believe, deep in my heart, that you can only get somewhere if you share knowledge.
- In general, if you share knowledge, all that you gain is more knowledge and better knowledge.
- Why open translation?
- That just seems like an essential part of what free culture can do,
- which proprietary culture can't.
- You know, we only have the capacity to produce the content in English because that's the only language I speak
- and the only language that other people who work on it speak,
- but we would like to see it in as many hands as possible because it's really useful information.
- There are so many cases where material is published in a major language like English
- that would be useful to people in other languages
- but they can't see it, and conversely, there is all this content that is published in other languages
- that's not visible to people because they don't speak the language.
- And the way the internet works is, if it's not translated, it's not visible to search engines,
- and so it's not visible to people.
- Not everyone uses English. I'm not a native English speaker.
- One of the concepts behind open content is access to knowledge,
- and in many parts of the world and for many societies, untranslated content is unaccessible.
- More and more stuff is getting published in open format content.
- Before it's simply opportunity that you use it to the full -- I mean, providing in other languages.
- The main reason we need open content to be translated is if we think who uses open content,
- and if our assumption is that the audience, or the potential audience, are the people that the content --
- the language that it was written in -- so if we assume that everyone speaks English,
- we essentially are missing hundreds and thousands of people who could benefit from open content.
- People all over the world want to use this content,
- they want to learn from it, they want to communicate.
- In order for the whole world to just be able to understand each other culturally, I think that's a very important point,
- and that's something that we can make a huge contribution to as a community.
- To have an exchange that is worldwide, we need to do it in many more languages,
- and if it's going to be an inclusive conversation where the entire world is invited,
- then it needs to be translated into a lot of other languages; otherwise, only certain cultures are allowed to participate
- because not every culture translates to every language, so you lose a lot of that cultural information.
- If people can't get access to knowledge in their own language, we can't create a globally equitable world.
- Why open source?
- Open content is about the free spread of knowledge and access to information without any restrictions.
- If the tools that make that open content available in other languages are themselves restricted
- under proprietary licenses, that creates a very unfortunate bottleneck where those tool providers
- have an unfair control over the distribution of that knowledge.
- By using open-source tools for translation, we're able to create an ecology
- that is most likely to spread and grow in both an equitable and powerful fashion for anyone with passion
- about contributing, changing, or evolving the overall ecology, has the ability to do it on their own terms.
- The really cool thing about open source and open content
- is that it more closely resembles the way information is exchanged in real life.
- I'm passionate about open source in particular because it enables people to take tools
- and customize them to whatever system or project that they're working on.
- You want open content to exist in as many languages as possible
- and to be as accessible to as many people as possible.
- The tools for doing that translation need to be in as many hands as possible.
- Open source developement is a much more efficient way of developing software
- because you share the code, so you can build on top of other technologies,
- which is really cool because you can build a tool that uses existing functionality
- and you don't have to reinvent the wheel.
- The proprietary tools are expensive, they're hard to access -- I mean, for the developing world,
- Even if a tool is inexpensive in the US or in the developed world, in the developing world it's going to be prohibitively expensive.
- As someone who used to translate a lot of blog posts from Spanish to English,
- I didn't think that it mattered if the translation software was open source or not.
- I just wanted to put something into a machine translation and get something out, and have a very easy way
- of fixing the errors and then putting it back in.
- But now that I am thinking about some of the translations that we're dealing with, which include Creole from Sierra Leone,
- Aymara from Bolivia and Bangla from Bangladash, there is not a lot of support for these tools,
- so I'm thinking, how do we improve these tools,
- and to improve the software and to make it better.
- If it's commercially licensed, a lot of those companies aren't going to be responsive to what you want,
- but if it's open source, then you can go in there yourself, and you can say, hey, I'm going to make this module,
- I'm going to help improve this tool.
- And you can adapt it for your own use, and I think that's really important.
- Where from here?
- I really hope that this connection that's been established here will maintain,
- and I hope that new projects will come out of it.
- The thing that I got out of the event the most is how complicated the issue is,
- how difficult it is, how many different layers,
- and you know, there are all sort of different contexts in which translation happens.
- The biggest revelation for me during the workshop was just the concept of using simple technologies
- to achieve translation workflow.
- So the idea of the battle to get content from a CMS or from a Wiki or a blog
- and realizing that with an RSS feed you can essentially get that content translated and send it back.
- That, for me, is like the biggest A-Ha!
- We should completely revolutionize how we see intellectual property in the digital world.
- This is the time also to say f**k it, and just do the revolution in that area.
- Diversity is so important for this world that -- you know -- we just have to translate all the time.
- My dream translation tool reads my mind and translates my content while I sleep,
- while also helping me lose weight and look more attractive to members of all genders.


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