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User talk:Sj

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Hi Sj. Welcome to the wiki. It's nice to see you over here. Thanks for your edits to the translations page. Angela Beesley 21:03, 18 February 2007 (CET)

About translations[edit]

My apologies for lengthy writing.

In the best of worlds, all translators would be good at writing well in the target language, careful about details, have good knowledge about the facts in the text they are translating, and have a good capacity of searching out information about things in the text they are not familiar with. In real life things are seldom that perfect. The Swedish team here atm I'd say is very good in the first, second and the last aspect, but is moderately familiar with some important concepts used and described. We probably started the translation partly as a way to get better understanding of what is going on, really. In a professional setting, that would be a very bad motivation for a translator. In this case, increased understanding of these concept is something that the Swedish-speaking Wikimedia communities will benefit from.

I personally also have a second motivation. One of my pet peevees regarding translations of texts in Wikimedia context is that a dialogue between translators and writers/authors is very valuable. The translation system at Meta has moved the translation away from the authors, which I think hampers the process. In the long run we should create a platform where translators and authors can meet naturally. If we look at translation as a mechanical one way process, not something dynamic that can carry information in many directions... we are really loosing something. Translators are often good at finding ambiguities in the text. Writing texts that are translatable is also a skill - and a learnable skill. This is a small wiki, so I thought "maybe this is an area where I could get some experience in this". Then the question is if the authors are interested.

To make a really good translation we'll need some feedback. The clever thing would be do to the Q&A-session onwiki; I am sure translators of other languages will share some of the questions, and then the answers could be reused. I started sketching a page for Q&A in my user space - see User:Habj/Translator questions 1.0 - but really, I wonder if it is not better to just put the questions on Talk:Definition, possibly under a common subheading. Putting it on a separate page means fewer people will visit it, and those who do will visit it less often.

Do you have any comments? If not... then I guess we'll put a couple of questions on Talk:Definition, wait and see if there is any response. If not, I guess we have done what we could - which is probably not enough to boldly state "this translation is now finished". If says at Translations that moderators/Erik should be contacted when a translation is finished, but I have no information on why and what that means for the text. // habj 19:22, 28 February 2007 (CET)