Transcript for Voices from Open Translation Tools 2007

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.