From Flu Wiki 2

Forum: Translation

15 July 2005

lugon – at 05:04

Main.Es-HomePage

This is just an experiment and, as such, may be stopped by the admins and owners at any time. We might learn and then move somewhere else.

Please post comments in this forum topic.

Thanks!

lugon – at 05:05

Sorry - pogge could you please change the title of this forum - it should not be “forum” but “translations” - I copy-pasted the wrong word, it seems! Sorry!

DemFromCTat 07:18

excellent question… thinking on it. As an editor, my problem is that I can not be responsible for languages other than english, yet the need to communicate is great.

Sister site/steal what you want? That may be better… expect some feedback, but this requires some thought.

DemFromCTat 07:25

renamed - my fault, not pogge’s - if it doesn’t work right.

16 July 2005

lugon – at 18:59

I’ve finished translating the main page of this wiki into Spanish.

It’s just an experiment done by a user of the wiki. I don’t know if the owners of the site agree that we should create translations here. Maybe they themselves can’t know yet until we try and think a little about it.

Maybe it would be best to have a sister site and “steal” content back and forth freely (within the limits of whatever license is used)?

If you look at the page I just finished translating, you’ll see a link to the original page, so that readers can check the content and maybe improve the quality of the translation. (This first page was carefully translated, but that will not always be easy to do.)

Many other details about the procedure would have to be agreed on or worked out:

Comments? Help? Suggestions?

17 July 2005

pogge – at 18:41

lugon wrote: “are there limits in the number or type of fonts this software can handle?”

Sounds like a question directed at me.

There are no inherent limits on fonts in the wiki when compared to any other web software. On the web, the problem is always in choosing fonts that you can safely predict the users will have because the text is actually rendered in the user’s browser from the fonts available on the user’s system.

The style for headings for this site specifies the fonts like so:

“Verdana, Geneva, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;”

That’s saying to the browser, if Verdana is available then use it. If it’s not, then use Geneva, etc. The final option is to use whatever the default sans-serif font is on the user’s system if none of the previous selections are available.

The only language other than English that I have any experience with on the web is French, and that only because in the course of blogging I might write about, e.g., our former Prime Minister Chrétien. And I get the accented ‘e’ by using the HTML encoding because it’s reliable on the web and means I don’t have to worry about which code page the user is running on his system. That opens a whole ‘nother can of worms.

18 July 2005

lugon   at 05:12

Yeah - French is even worse than Spanish in that regard, as there are “backslash” accents and not only “forwardslash” accents.

I see Main.Es-HomePage? correctly from here. Do you?

I think I’ll better try and contact people who may have gone through this before, in order not to have to reinvent the wheel … hang on … google … http://www.pmichaud.com/wiki/PmWikiEs/PmWikiEs Para poner PmWiki 2 en español guarda este archivo llamado PmWikiEs.XLPage en la carpeta /wikilib.d (the page was updated a couple of days ago - talk about synchronicity!)

I was alerted to a change in the original of the page I had translated. that will be something else to think of: synchronisation of changes. There might be a “clever link” to the original page, something like “original in suchaplace last updated in suchadate1 - this translatin last updated in suchadate2″. Tabbed browsing of both “this page history” would reveal what changes have been done, etc.

I don’t know if people can subscribe to a page in order to receive notification by email whenever that page is changed.

So much to learn. But if this works then it can be used in a number of sites and projects, so it will be good to at least describe our problems and wishes.

Thanks (everyone) for joining this discussion!

lugon – at 05:25

btw, all my posting here is primarily in the public domain (i.e. public domain unless I state otherwise).

Please write “ppd” or “pd” somewhere in your replies if you agree - so we may share this content as freely as possible.

There are quite a few networks using pmwiki and whatever we learn in one place can be used in the other quite easily.

Thanks!

On the other hand, it may not be really necessary as I would think our ideas, if they are good, will be stolen anyway ;)

pogge – 08:16

I don’t know if people can subscribe to a page in order to receive notification by email whenever that page is changed.

Not to my knowledge. You can get the RSS feed by category (what PmWiki refers to as group) but not by page. It’s based on the Recent Changes pages and there’s currently nothing like that at the level of individual pages.

pogge – at 08:22

Sorry, meant to add that yes, the Spanish version of the home page looks fine to me. I’m set to English (Canada) - US in Windows. (If I go to either of the other Canadian English options it remaps my keyboard - my forward slash becomes é. Can’t have that.)

DemFromCT11:20

there is a disclaimer link at the bottom of every page for licensing info.

As in Wikipedia, everything on the Fluwiki is under The GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL or simply GFDL), a copyleft license for free content designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU project. It is the open content counterpart to the GNU GPL. The current state of the license is version 1.2, the official text of which can be found at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html.
The license stipulates that any copy of the material, even if modified, carry the same license. Those copies may be sold but, if produced in quantity, have to be made available in a format which facilitates further editing. The Wikipedia explanation can be found here.

21 July 2005

lugon – at 19:59

Dem from CT has alerted me to http://newweb.www.paho.org/Spanish/DD/PIN/Numero22_articulo1.htm

I’ll place it apropriately but wanted to link to it from here too.

25 July 2005

lugon – 05:08

Ok so let’s imagine we need to translate the whole fluwikie into 20 languages. Say it’s about 500 pages in less than 1 week. I think we’d need to:

- find hosting space. Easy as soon as we tap on our networks. Just scream in the apropriate forums and we’d have more hosting space than we can manage.

- set up wikis with pmwiki or mediawiki or whatever. There may be need to use different “wiki engines” if we run into trouble with different languages or if experts who are ready to help can help better using this or that. Such wikis - it would be good if the pages could be printed to paper, perhaps as a pdf file - we might want to have this as a resource that can be printed in a newspaper and copied to a million readers - eventually. (I hope not, of course.) A CD can be distributed by newspapers too - lots of “second wave” (one-to-many) communication, we’d get.

- spread the existence of such wikis in a handful of blogs. Ask for translators, technical translators, experts in the fields, students of languages, people who are not experts in translation but who are good typists and can go to the translator’s home for a couple of hours - see what you can do and what you want to do.

- set up a “volunteer” page in each language-specific wiki, a “computer expertise volunteer” page (probably here on the original fluwikie), and also a “resources for translation” page, and a “frequent issues and difficult words” page. This pages can be read by those kind souls who speak three languages so there’s some further cross-polination.

- copy-and-paste all the pages from the original wiki to the language-specific wikis, with a signal “please translate into this other language” at the top, and an unobtrusive link to “volunteers”, “difficult words”, etc. If some pages are rather long, say more than a page, they can be copied to several pages and linked as a wikitrail, so translators can work in parallel. If this is not practical, just leave it, as it’s only necessary when there are many translators working at the same time. Alternatively, they can bring their homework to their personal pages and work there until they are finished.

- start translating like ants around a big fat cake. If there’s urgency there will be people whose main work will be to monitor a handful of pages - focus, don’t panic - so correlation between languages is kept useful, and important things are not missed. So we could have “priorities” pages, “changes” pages, etc.

All the meta-organisation could be done using this wiki - this thread, even - and email and instant messengers or skype or what not. The broader the band, the merrier the gang.

Could it be done?

Yes.

When?

28 July 2005

lugon – at 05:55

Ok, growing slowly, we are.

It looks like two other people have translated some other things into Spanish: one translated a full page (in two sessions) and the other has translated just a few words (testing the waters, it seems).

My method so far:

- I create a “sister page” with a different name. So far it’s “es” plus the original name. If the page belongs in a section, I leave the translated page in the same section. I create the fresh page using the content of the window in the browser where you write the h-t-t-p-etc-etc part: I edit the name and the wiki creates a fresh page with no content, which I can edit.

- I press “edit” in the original and copy all the original text from the original into the edit window of the Spanish page. So far it’s just a copy of the page, with the same content, and with a different name.

- Now I add some things at the top of the Spanish page: a link to the original with a comment (“see the original to check and make the translation better”), a link to this forum topic, and some motivation and thanks to translators. I think I should add a link to a “help for translators” page … explaining all this procedure.

Or maybe I can take care of creating the Spanish pages all by myself, with content in English and “translation links”, and then let others start translating each page.

Going from one translator to 5 will be tricky. Going from 5 to 100 should be easier.

Any comments and help and hints and suggestions would be very much appreciated. Thanks!

29 July 2005

lugon – 06:24

Thanks for the link at http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/h5n1/2005/07/nonenglish_flu_.html

lugon – at 06:25

There, I wrote:

It may be difficult to go from 2 translators (yes, a friend of mine fell in the trap! ;)) to 5 - in this your assistance is very important. But then I guess we could go from 5 to 20 or more in no time.

We need to work out the details of keeping translations up to date with the original (and viceversa!), etc. But it does look doable - how do people at wikipedia do it? Would their methodology work with a really fast developement cycle? Can we subscribe to pet pages and keep an eye on them? etc, etc, etc

So thanks for telling others! This is very important and I think it’s low hanging fruit, really. (I wonder what other low hanging fruits are there in this regard. We might as well get creative …)

3 August 2005

RicardoCardenesat 17:29

Hi, I’m one of the Spanish translators. I was speaking just yesterday to lugon (IRL) and told him something I’ve noticed since I started translating and that we should try to correct. Just go to any of the translated pages, e.g. Introducción a la Gripe I?.

Look at the top of the page. There you’ll find that the the link to the parent points to the English version?, not to the Spanish one?, and that (I guess) could confuse the readers.

That’s of course, because the hierarchy starts on Science, not Es-Science or something like that.

Should we start a new top hierarchy element for every translated language so all this gets more coherent?

DemFromCTat 18:02 PM

It’s because of how the wiki works. All the pages point to the first (English) category page.

I can move them eventually (I think). This remains a very helpful and successful experiment, and I can see why when the Science pages are done, we’d want them to all point to the Spanish version of the category (e.g. Es-Science).

Keep translating, if you will , and assume I’ll fix it!

8 August 2005

lugon – at 12:09

Peeking a bit from holidays - your work is in my mind, folks! If I’m lucky I’ll meet Ricardo and others in a few days, and I’ll try to get us to think a bit further about how to move things faster and more powerfully. Keep it up!

13 August 2005

lugon – at 13:03

there’s another idea that might be worth trying out - live chat between one or more of the reveres, and one or more “users of the same kind”. Just imagine: a revere and a shoeshop owner, over internet-relay-chat or instant-messanging …

revere: hi, so where do you work?

shoeshopowner: i own a shoeshop

revere: yep, how many workers?

sso: hmm, about 5, some part time

revere: how many deal directly with the buyers?

if the chat is in the public domain or similar license, then all shopowners would be able to read the chat, edit it with further questions (and answers) etc …

whatchathink?

14 August 2005

lugon – at 02:09

This idea may be explored here: http://www.fluwikie.com/index.php?n=Main.ExpertsHelpOpenly42fedf31

So this topic is open for Translations

Melanie – at 13:42

lugon,

Thank you for taking the responsibility for organizing this. It’s very helpful, and pogge’s help has been essential.

18 August 2005

Michael (@vivtek.com) – at 18:25

Hi! I’m coming into this a little late, as I’m only occasionally dipping into this site, but I’m particularly interested in this notion of maintaining multiple languages in parallel. I’m a programmer and technical translator by trade(s), and I’d be extremely interested in working with the technical group to set up a few tools, and translate anything back into English from Spanish, French, German, or Hungarian. (Not that I’m prescribing any language choices, just listing the ones I could personally translate.)

Some quasi-random ideas off the top of my head:

1. It’d be cleanest to maintain a set of Wikis, each with its own set of topics and linking structure (and, you see, its own navigational elements so you’re not catapulted back into some other language at random.)

2. Content generated in any language on any page should be flagged as needing eventual translation into the other languages. This would be done via script. Yes, this is something I could most happily write.

3. Pages should have their own locally named identifiers, with a table listing the parallel pages in each language’s Wiki site.

4. There should be a local language forum on each Wiki. Particularly interesting threads should be flagged by editors for translation so that there could be some interplay between languages, and bilingual commentors should be encouraged to compose their comments in more than one language from the get-go.

5. Ideally there should be a translation tool which would do diffs on the page versions and highlight changes in the flagged topics from point #2. Then a translator wouldn’t have to guess when deciding which bits needed maintenance.

6. Of course, if you were *really* serious about this kind of setup, you’d integrate a translation memory and segmentation into the translation tool so that sentences were reused when possible and then you’d have a concordance tool to simplify repeated terminology lookup. But I digress, into an open-source project I haven’t actually started yet. Sigh. So many things to do, so little time…

So those are my thoughts. I remain interested in helping out where possible, but as I’m native US-English myself, it’s Not a Good Idea for me to attempt translation into other languages, from a professional standpoint. Otherwise I’d try to start a German version.

19 August 2005

DemFromCTat 08:49

Thanks for your comments! Referred elsewhere to the tech folks.

What, as an editor, I’m still struggling with is the idea of who controls content. ‘Sister’ wikis may be the way to go eventually, but how does one synchronize and make sure the content you put up in English is the content you get in German or some other language? The editors can’t do it. Recruiting editors in other languages may be the answer (and what we’ve done so far), but as you note, it all takes time and our resources are not unlimited.

That’s why idea 1, the cleanest, is not where we started. It is and was an experiment (with Spanish via volunteers), though I think more successful than we hoped.

Definately needs some thought. I have learned thinking, then doing, with wikis is best.

20 August 2005

Michael – at 03:25

I’m not denigrating the effort so far, not at all. That’s the obvious way to start with a volunteer effort. But if you want self-contained language Wikis (by “self-contained” I mean e.g. “a Spanish Wiki that doesn’t jump the Spanish-speaking user back into English with every click”) then I think, given the structure of Wikis, my setup’s the way to do it. Wikipedia does the same thing.

You’re right that you’d need editors who read additional languages. If you, DemCT, don’t speak e.g. German, then obviously you can’t know whether German content corresponds to English content, and you’re going to have to trust your translators and/or a German-language editor (the need to trust translators could be alleviated by using a workflow system to force editor approval before translated content is used; see below). One way to get trustworthy translation would be to solicit help from professional translators on a pro-bono basis; posting the job periodically at Proz.com would do the trick on that. There are always people interested in an effort like this which wouldn’t represent much time spent but which is indeed a job worth doing well.

As to synchronization of the sister Wikis with the main Wiki — that’s exactly what I’m proposing in point #2. Each topic in PmWiki is a database entry, so it would be simple (ha, nothing is ever “simple”, but you know what I mean) to set up a table of correspondences, effectively a matrix with one row for each page and one column for each language.

I’m assuming that PmWiki stores the time last edited for each page (otherwise you wouldn’t have a Recent Topics page, you see). So a script can easily note that a page has been changed more recently than its other-language mirrors, and those other-language mirrors can then be flagged as needing maintenance by translators. Once a translation is complete, the local language editor could be asked to check the content. If you were relatively paranoid about the abilities of your (volunteer) translators, or if you had the translation feature open to the public in order to remove the barriers to translation by anybody, then you could also have a simple workflow system which could accept a suggested translation, then ask an editor to approve it before updating the page in the other-language mirror. That’s relatively straightforward content-management workflow.

Besides the action of editing pages, you also have the action of adding them. If a page is added in one language, then you’d need a script to note that and ask a local language editor or translator to create a corresponding page in the other languages which can be linked to later. This is somewhat more effort than monolingual Wikis because you ideally want the link names in each language to be in the local language, so human intervention is required when that happens.

I think you could probably do all this with no changes to PmWiki, i.e. just with background scripts reading the database.

Anyhoo, I’m available for questions or help setting it up; just email if I don’t stop by with sufficient frequency.

DemFromCTat 09:15

Thanks so much!! All great ideas. It’ll take a while to synthesize.

pogge – at 11:46

Michael:

To clarify one point, PmWiki isn’t a database-driven wiki, it’s flat file. Each page is an individual text file which stores the current content as well as the entire history of the page. I don’t think that makes any part of what you’re suggesting impractical but the approach would be a little different than with a database-driven system.

22 August 2005

Michael – at 09:11

Ah, a flat file storage system. Well, the principle is the same, really, but scanning for changes and additions would be a little more expensive in that case. But not *that* much more.

But it would work the same, really. Maybe better, actually, since you have history readily available.

23 August 2005

Yves – at 05:48 AM

Switching topics here.

Pogge added a page with links to the RSS feeds. would it be possible to add the modifications to the French and Spanish sections as well?

Next question: I tried to insert an image in a translated page, but it was password protected. How to deal with this?

pogge – at 08:20

Yves:

The French and Spanish pages are covered by those feed links. If a page is in the Main category, for example, then it will be in the feed for that category.

If you want to email the image to me (that’s a mailto link) and tell me which page it should be associated with, I’d be happy to upload it for you. That’s the way we’re handling uploads for the moment.

Edited to add:

Or is this an image that’s already on the site and it’s just a matter of properly qualifying the link to it?

Yves – at 08:48

Actually, I wanted to include the image which is in the English version of ‘Influenza Primer 1′ using the same reference (Attach:resp.JPG Δ).

But it is password protected.

pogge – at 09:47

The wiki software organizes uploads by category just as it does pages. The English version of Influenza Primer I is in the Science category.

If the French version has been created in a different category then you have to qualify the link to the image by placing the category name in front of the file name with a forward slash (/) separating them.

I’ll use the escape sequence to show the code so the image doesn’t actually appear here: Attach:Science/resp.jpg

If that doesn’t work, please let me know.

If it does work then it tells you that at least one of the French translations is in a different category than its English counterpart. We can fix that but it would be better to get a handle on how many pages are involved and do it all at once. Meanwhile that should solve your immediate problem.

The way the translation project is being handled will be up for serious discussion once some key people are back from vacations. Please bear with us.

RicardoCardenes22:29

Just as Michael, I’m a programmer by trade, and technical translator (but this only as a contribution to the FreeSoftware community), and I’ve dealt before with syncronization problem. I like the solution that we use at Debian, with WML files, and I think it can be extended to the Wiki format, with just a bit of effort.

As lugon told to DemFromCT just a week ago by mail, I’ve been looking at pmwiki’s code, and I have a number of ideas to write a library add-on to let us easily translate the wiki pages, while the backend writes down the translations to an alternative hierarchy over the filesystem, and keeps an eye over the desincronizations, warning the reader (and posibly the translators too) when this happens.

I just didn’t want to step forward before my vacations (starting Sep/01), but I see it’s being discussed already :-)

05 October 2005

lugon – at 06:17

I’ve talked to Ricardo. No easy fix. Let’s translate regardless. Now, how do we find helpers? Hmm.

16 October 2005

lugon – at 05:19

I messed things up a little when trying to translate Tour Level IV. I created Main.Es-TourLevelV which should be deleted. The real thing is at Main.Es-TourNivelIV. Sorry!

lugon – at 18:24

Sorry again - it’s the other way round - there’s a tag changing the title above. Never mind!

04 November 2005

davidh@oi.com.br – at 16:07

Hello My name is David. Today is november, 4th, 2005. I am from Brazil and lookink for help for already translated to portuguese material for local plans. Mr. Crawford Kilian sugested me to contact this forum.

The more I read about H5N1 the more people say me I am with a weird obssession. David Vianna

06 November 2005

lugon – at 18:53

David,

I sent you an email today - I thought you could translate - maybe you can at least start it. A not very good translation can be corrected later by some other person - that’s why there’s a link to the original at the top of the page.

I’ve created http://www.fluwikie.com/index.php?n=Main.Po-TourLevelI (notice the “Po-“ for Portuguese) so you, or someone you can trick into helping, can translate at least a few paragraphs.

In my experience, people who help you with the translation may consider it a learning experience, as they have to read carefully in order to translate.

Ask just for a little bit. Click on “edit”, translate one word in the text box, add an “author” and a “summary” in the appropriate boxes, click on “save”.

A question for others - we’re just trying, and we can’t be sure if this “translation experiment” is the best way to do things. It might well be that it’s best to drop translations here at fluwikie, and have “sister sites” (sites run, paid for and supervised - all by other people who speak each language). We just can’t know right now.

But I think it would be good to have one page translated into say three or four other languages (we have French, Spanish and Turkish - Chinese comes to mind) just so that we have some experience with how to work at it.

Doing more than that (“one page”) may be too much for this site, which is huge in ambition and contributions but, I guess, modest in infrastructure. But doing just that (one page x 3 languages) might help recruit a number of people who would later, when things are more mature, be able to move things on the translation front.

What do you all think?

21 January 2006

David – at 02:49

Hi I can not find coordinates for a feedback.

lugon – at 04:30

write to demfromct or melanie - see: http://www.fluwikie.com/index.php?n=About.About

Quoth the Raven – at 05:51

Moderators: Has anyone noticed that this forum gets spiderbot posted with porn every day at the same time? Is there any concern that the spider program will “find” the rest of the forums if this is allowed to continue? Perhaps the forum should be retired since it is quite inactive. Would this prevent the problem?

04 February 2006

pogge – at 13:48

Believe me, I’ve noticed. There’s one other thread that gets hit regularly with gambling spam. I tried closing that one to further comment but it didn’t help - the junk gets through anyway. And I don’t want to delete this thread because it’s valuable. So I use this and the other one like honey pots. I check them every time they float to the top of the recent changes page, add the urls and keywords to the blocklist page I maintain, and then delete the spam. The blocklist is working - none of the urls are repeats. There’s just so many of them.

17 February 2006

stg – at 20:22

a small report on the work on the Norwegian Fluwikiforum: www.fluwiki.no domain is in hand… We have choosen forum software… I have translated the Fluwiki intro and FAQ into norwegian (sinse norwegian is such a small language i dont think you should bother making a norwegian translation like spanish of french)… We will put the intro on our domain instead. I am writing a intro on the norwegian forum policy, trying to create a “recruiting gateway” for the wiki. We are recruiting moderators. No answers yet.. A design is not ready.. Have to make a norwegian disclaimer.. And is planning to make a tekst describing the experience of making a national forum as a add on to the real wiki. A lot more to do…. Someone is alredy threatning us wit good PR.. So I have to find a way to put you in the spotlight, and present us as a national forum..

18 February 2006

Martin – at 06:02

Hi. You have very nice website! Beautiful design.

03 March 2006

Bill – at 10:33

Greetings to all! Excuse for this message, but at you excellent design of a site! Very much it was pleasant to me, I shall come here very often!

04 March 2006

crfullmoon – at 10:10

bump!

Any more people able to translate, if their area needs the Flu Wiki information in their language?

lugon – at 13:18

crfullmoon - I’d suggest we translate http://www.fluwikie.com/index.php?n=Main.TourLevelI to a few more languages. This would be useful and it would also create a problem (for the site Owners).

I’ve been working with a computer expert (many are experts when you compare them with me) to design the multilingual capabilities we’d need.

Trust in translators of languages not known by the Owners is one of them. We can all imagine “cough inside your elbow” might become “cough outside your elbow” or “all fluwikians are silly” when translated into another target language.

My experience with translation boils down to this:

  1. Before translating a page we need to “set it up”. Example:
  2. It’s discouraging to find that a page you translated has been edited in the original language. I.e., updating translations is a pain. I’ve tried to find ways to have a “diff” (Linux people know what I’m talking about) between the original page when I synchronised them and the original page as it is now, so that I’ll be able to focus on “the changes, just the changes”. I might have to keep the original page when I synchronised them in my own computer, but that behaviour is not easy for myself, and maybe even worse for others.

Main.TourLevelI would be a great experiment, and directly useful.

lugon – at 13:24

The “set it up” job needs no translation skills! So maybe we can help each other?

Finding trustable translators is a job on its own:

Also, we might want to experiment with having an external site that runs parallel to this one.

We will run into trouble when there are changes in the “target” language and Chinese has newer edits than English, etc.

Worth trying and learning, step by step, incrementally, without annoying the Owners? You bet!

07 March 2006

Jeniffer – at 01:48

A great site where one can enjoy the thought of a great mind long departed. Cheers for the good work!

08 March 2006

Arthur – at 16:30

spam deleted - pogge

anonymous – at 17:45

SPAM

anonymous – at 20:53

“Ah don’t loike Spam!”

17 March 2006

Martin – at 23:11

Very interesting and beautiful site. It is a lot of helpful information. Thanks!

22 March 2006

Marko – at 12:59

Hi. Beautiful content and website design. Sorry for my english. I am from albania.

27 May 2006

BroncoBillat 00:54

Older thread, closing for speed purposes.

check dates

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