Locating foci of translation on Wikipedia
Some methodological proposals
In spite of its highly multilingual nature, it is generally accepted that most Wikipedia content is the product of original writing rather than being translated from another language version of the encyclopaedia. Wikipedia represents what is almost a complete, self-contained but vast research ecosystem; however, an unusual initial challenge for the researcher is to identify the primary data for a specific research project. The main aim of this paper is to make a number of proposals towards a possible methodology for discovering where the main foci of this new type of collaborative translation are located. Significant methods for this include the use of the encyclopaedia’s list-based structure and of different features of page anatomy. The article also aims to outline specific topics for research and, during the discussion, offers some initial findings of its own, using Russian and Chinese to English translation as its main sources of examples.
Keywords: Wikipedia translation, collaborative translation, interwiki links, Revision History, Talk Pages, Chinese, Russian, Ukrainian
This article is currently available as a sample
article.
Published online: 04 December 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.6.2.07shu
https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.6.2.07shu
Full-text
Locating foci of translation on WikipediaReferences
[ p. 330 ]References
Alonso, Elisa
2015 “Analysing the Use and Perception of Wikipedia in the Professional Context of Translation”. The Journal of Specialised Translation 23: 89–117. Accessed 4 November 2016. www.jostrans.org/issue23/art_alonso.pdf.
“
Assassination of Boris Nemtsov” 2017 Wikipedia. Accessed 13 August 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Boris_Nemtsov, date updated 13 July 2017.
Ayers, Phoebe, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates
2008 How Wikipedia Works and How You Can Be a Part of It. San Francisco: No Starch Press, Inc. [Also available at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/How_Wikipedia_Works.]
Brandes, Ulrik, Patrick Kenis, Jürgen Lerner, and Denise van Raaij
2009 “Network Analysis of Collaboration Structure in Wikipedia”. Paper given at the
World Wide Web Conference 2009
, April 20–24 2009, Madrid. Accessed 4 November 2016. http://cs.smith.edu/classwiki/images/a/a9/Network_analysis_collaboration_wikipedia.pdf. 
“
Category:Articles Needing Translation from Chinese Wikipedia” 2016 Wikipedia. Accessed 4 November 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_needing_translation_from_Chinese_Wikipedia.
“
Category:Articles Needing Translation from Foreign-language Wikipedias” 2016 Wikipedia. Accessed 4 November 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_needing_translation_from_foreign-language_Wikipedias.
“
Category:Articles Needing Translation from Russian Wikipedia” 2016 Wikipedia. Accessed 4 November 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_needing_translation_from_Russian_Wikipedia.
“
Category:Articles Needing Translation from Ukrainian Wikipedia” 2016 Wikipedia. Accessed 4 November 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_needing_translation_from_Ukrainian_Wikipedia.
“
Category:Pages Translated from Chinese Wikipedia” 2016 Wikipedia. Accessed 4 November 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pages_translated_from_Chinese_Wikipedia.
“
Category:Pages Translated from Russian Wikipedia” 2016 Wikipedia. Accessed 4 November 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pages_translated_from_Russian_Wikipedia.
“
Category:Translated Pages” 2016 Wikipedia. Accessed 4 November 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Translated_pages.
“
Category:Wikipedia Translation Templates” 2016 Wikipedia. Accessed 4 November 2016. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_translation_templates.
Désilets, Alain, Lucas Gonzalez, Sébastien Paquet and Marta Stojanovic
2006 “Translation the Wiki Way”. Proceedings of WikiSym 2006 – The 2006 International Symposium on Wikis, Odense, Denmark, August 21–23 2006 Accessed 4 November 2016; log-in needed. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1149464.
Fernández Costales, Alberto
2013 “Crowdsourcing and Collaborative Translation: Mass Phenomena or Silent Threat to Translation Studies?’ Hermēneus. Revista de Traducción e Interpretación, 15: 85–110. Accessed 4 November 2016. http://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/HS/article/viewFile/30295/15892.
Gambier, Yves and Luc van Doorslaer
[ p. 331 ]
eds. 2013 (Benjamins) Translation Studies Bibliography. Accessed 13 August 2017. https://www-benjamins-com.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/online/tsb/.
Holmes, James S.
2004 “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies”. in The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd Edition, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 180–192. London: Routledge.
“
How will massive online collaboration impact the world of translation”. n.d. Accessed 4 November 2016. http://www.wiki-translation.com/How+will+massive+online+collaboration+impact+the+world+of+translation.
Jiménez-Crespo, Miguel A.
2017 Crowdsourcing and Online Collaborative Translations: Expanding the Limits of Translation Studies. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Liao, Han-teng and Thomas Petzold
2010 “Analysing Geo-linguistic Dynamics of the World Wide Web: The Use of Cartograms and Network Analysis to Understand Linguistic Development in Wikipedia”. Journal of cultural science, 3 (2): 1–18. Accessed 4 November 2016. http://cultural-science.org/journal/index.php/culturalscience/article/view/47/77.
“
List of Cities and Towns in Russia by Population” 2016 Wikipedia. Accessed 4 November 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_Russia_by_population, date updated 19 October 2016.
“
List of Cities in China by Population” 2016 Wikipedia. Accessed 4 November 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_population, date updated 28 August 2016.
“
List of Lists of Lists” 2016 Wikipedia. Accessed 4 November 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists, date updated 29 October 2016.
McDonough Dolmaya, Julie
2015 “Revision History: Translation Trends in Wikipedia”. Translation Studies 8(1): 16–34. Accessed 5 November 2016. .
.“
Meta:Translate Extension” 2016 Wikimedia. Accessed 4 November 2016. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Translate_extension, date updated 2 March 2016.
Plamadă, Magdalena and Martin Volk
2013 “Mining for Domain-specific Parallel Text from Wikipedia”. Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora, Sofia, Bulgaria 8 August 2013, 112–120. Accessed 4 November 2016. www.aclweb.org/anthology/W13-2514.
“
Road of life” 2017 Wikipedia. Accessed 13 August 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_of_Life, date updated 11 August 2017.
Shuttleworth, Mark
2015 “Wikipedia Translation: Collaborativity, Translation and the Web.” IATIS 5th International Conference, Belo Horizonte, Brazil 7–10 July 2015, slides available at https://www.academia.edu/13808267/5th_IATIS_Conference_Wikipedia_presentation. Accessed 24/4/2017.
2018. “Translation and the Production of Knowledge in Wikipedia: Chronicling the Assassination of Boris Nemtsov”. To appear in Alif 38.
Suchecki, Krzysztof, Alkim Almila Akdag Salah, Cheng Gao, and Andrea Scharnhorst
2012 “Evolution of Wikipedia’s Category Structure”. Advances in Complex Systems, 15 supp01. Accessed 4 November 2016; log-in needed). .
.“
Translation of the week” 2016 Wikipedia. Accessed 4 November 2016. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_of_the_week, date updated 31 October 2016.
“
Wikipedia:Pages Needing Translation into English” 2016 Wikipedia. Accessed 4 November 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pages_needing_translation_into_English, date updated 4 November 2016.
“
[ p. 332 ]
Wikipedia:Translation” 2016 Wikipedia. Accessed 4 November 2016. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Translation, date updated 27 October 2016.
“
Wikipedia:WikiProject Intertranswiki” 2016 Wikipedia. Accessed 4 November 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Intertranswiki, date updated 2 November 2016.
“
Wikipedia WikiProject Medicine_Translation task force” 2016 Wikipedia. Accessed 4 November 2016. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Translation_task_force, date updated 14 October 2016.
Yasseri, Taha, Anselm Spoerri, Mark Graham, and János Kertész
2014 “The Most Controversial Topics in Wikipedia: A Multilingual and Geographical Analysis”. in Global Wikipedia: International and Cross-cultural Issues in Online Collaboration, edited by Pnina Fichman and Noriko Hara, 25–48. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield.
Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Aghaebrahimian, Ahmad, Stauder, Andy & Ustaszewski, Michael
2020. Automatically extracted parallel corpora enriched with highly useful metadata? A Wikipedia case study combining machine learning and social technology.
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
Al-Shehari, Khaled & Abdul Gabbar Al-Sharafi
2020. Negotiating Wikipedia narratives about the Yemeni crisis: Who are the alleged supporters of the Houthis?.
Media, War & Conflict ► pp. 175063522093840 ff.
Jones, Henry
2019. Wikipedia as a translation zone.
Target 31:1 ► pp. 77 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 november 2020. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.