Article published In:
Translation SpacesVol. 6:2 (2017) ► pp.310–332
Translation and Technologies
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
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Why study Wikipedia translation – and how?
- 2.1Wikipedia and Wikipedia translation
- 2.2The Wikipedia research ecosystem
- 3.Approaches to data gathering
- 3.1The manual approach
- 3.2Lists of pages
- 3.2.1“Pages translated from…”
- 3.2.2“Articles needing translation from…”
- 3.2.3“Pages needing translation into English”
- 3.3Page anatomy
- 3.3.1Revision history
- 3.3.2Talk pages
- 3.4Other approaches
- 4.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
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