Building bridges not walls – Wikipedia’s new Content Translation tool [1505] Members : #OER17

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Thu, Apr 6 2017, 11:40am – 12:40pm

Authors: Ewan McAndrew

Room: Conf. Hall

Theme: Participation & Social Equality

Type: Lightning talks

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Description

Wikimedia’s mission is to be ‘the sum of all human knowledge’. That Wikipedia has amassed over 40 million articles in over 290 languages in its short existence is quite incredible and a testament to the dedication of its community of volunteers. Yet the distribution of articles in these different language Wikipedias is nowhere near evenly spread.

Wikipedia’s new Content Translation tool offers an impactful means of sharing open knowledge globally between languages as it brings up an article on one side of the screen in one language and helps translate it, paragraph by paragraph, to create the article in a different language taking all the formatting across to the new article so a native speaker just has to check to make sure the translation is as good as it can be.

This presentation will outline the successful models already employed in a Higher Education context where one editor was able to translate five articles on notable Women in STEM onto Portuguese Wikipedia in one afternoon and where thirty Translation Studies MSc students were able to complete the translation of Wikipedia articles of 4000 words into different language Wikipedias. In this way, sharing open knowledge between languages and improving areas of under-representation.

Cohen, N. (2014). Wikipedia Emerges as Trusted Internet Source for Ebola Information. [online] Nytimes.com. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/business/media/wikipedia-is-emerging-as-trusted-internet-source-for-information-on-ebola-.html?_r=1 [Accessed 19 Jan. 2017].

Sutcliffe, D. (2016). Wikipedia’s Ongoing Search for the Sum of All Human Knowledge. [online] Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/@oiioxford/wikipedia-s-ongoing-search-for-the-sum-of-all-human-knowledge-6216fb478bcf#.f2y9zhtc1 [Accessed 19 Jan. 2017].

Vogel, M. (2015). Teaching translation through editing Wikipedia. [online] Web.archive.org. Available at: http://web.archive.org/web/20150909114449/https://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/case-studies-news/e-learning/teaching-translation-wikipedia [Accessed 19 Jan. 2017].

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