Translation

Translation is a difficult job, but it has many rewards. A good translator can open dialogue, foster understanding and improve cooperation in cross-cultural multilingual settings. This learning project tackles translation from the bottom up starting with crude and simplistic methods, for and by inexperienced translators. Hopefully people who know what they are doing will join the effort.

Create translation table
We're going to do things the hard way, using OmegaWiki as a place to start. We create a translation table with the words, create, translation and table in their connotations for making a data table for translation:

We find those here, here and here. Notice that the tables not only come short of having all the words but they can reveal extra words. For example create in Dutch could also be scheppen and in German could also be erstellen, erschaffen, or schaffen. As an English user, I know that create could be substituted with make, produce, build and several other words without altering the meaning all that much. It is important to collaborate extensively in multilingual translation projects.

Seeding and expanding a translation table
The following translation table from meta was created by native French speaker and meta-wikipedian, Sam. It began as a tool for he and other Wikipedians who didn't comment their changes, leaving the comment line blank. Sam reasoned it might have been because they weren't sure of how to spell words correctly, use grammar, punctuation, etc. Originally named Wikispeling, the table began in his user space at the French Wikipedia and emerged at meta in the form of Wikispelling. Here's its genesis on 10 December 2004:

And here is the version 5 years later as of 31 July 2009:

You can see that manually generated and maintained wikitables can be worth all the trouble in the long term.

Computer-assisted translation
Computer-assisted translation.

Vertaalkunde Treiñ ha troidigezh Преводач Traducció lingüística Тăлмач Oversættelse Tõlge Traduko Itzulpengintza fa:ترجمه Traduzion Tradución अनुवाद Þýðing תרגום ಭಾಷಾಂತರ Fordítás Penterjemahan Vertaling Oversettelse Tłumaczenie (przekład) Traducere Translation Çeviri Переклад Tradusion Thông dịch Ratournaedje (langue) 翻译