This post comes much much too late, so I think rather than attempt to cover what happened on day 2 of the iSummit I’ll just point to a few places that have more details. To find out about our session, I strongly recommend having a look at the article written by (fellow Canadian) Wojciech Gryc of five minutes to midnight and posted at the Summit blog.
Gryc introduces the session this way:
In a web of open content and collaboration, it is often assumed that simply setting your information “free” is all you need to promote it to the world. Often times — especially on an international level — this takes much more effort. Such was the discussion of the Open Content, Open Translation: Multilingual Solutions session of the Local Context, Global Commons lab.
His observations later in the article about the challenges of translation in an open distributed context are bang on:
User interfaces are a key challenge for effective translation. While open source packages like MediaWiki and Wordpress have support for multilingual interfaces or posts, the translation process itself requires more than just a dictionary and somewhere to type. Translators often use sites like Wikipedia or extensively search the web to understand the cultural contexts of certain sayings and metaphors. For example, how would you translate “It was raining cats and dogs” into Swahili — and more importantly, how would an African volunteer figure out that this is a metaphor for “heavy rain”?
This brings up a difficult problem in user interface design: How can sotware developers build user interfaces for translation that not only provide support for using dictionaries and typing text, but actually help search for the meanings of analogies, supported fonts, verb conjugations, and other language-specific features? For example, how would a translator converting an English text to Japanese know when to use a formal (polite) or informal verb conjugation, when the original writer never even had to consider such a choice? Luckily, tools like QRedit are already trying to solve the problem.
(QRedit, by the way, is a tool being developed in the lab of Kyo Kageura (under the title of the Shiitake Project), originally only for English-to-Japanese translation but now also usable in the J->E direction as well.)
For more of an overview of the iSummit, see the special coverage page at Global Voices, and the two articles I posted there: one a general recap, and the other a translation of a post by Shinya Ichinohe about the division between Japanese and English speaking participants at the summit. For those interested in the challenges of language and culture in organizing international events like iSummit, I strongly recommend having a read of Ichinohe-san’s perspective, which I found very insightful.
