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.
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Cited by 7 other publications
Aghaebrahimian, Ahmad, Andy Stauder & Michael Ustaszewski
2021. Automatically extracted parallel corpora enriched with highly useful metadata? A Wikipedia case study combining machine learning and social technology. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 36:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Al-Shehari, Khaled & Abdul Gabbar Al-Sharafi
2022. Negotiating Wikipedia narratives about the Yemeni crisis: Who are the alleged supporters of the Houthis?. Media, War & Conflict 15:2 ► pp. 183 ff.
Al-Shehari, Khaled & Ali Almanna
2022. Collaborative translation of Wikipedia: with whom do trainee translators collaborate and for what purpose?. The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 16:4 ► pp. 448 ff.
Desjardins, Renée
2021. Are Citizen Science “Socials” Multilingual? Lessons in (Non)translation from Zooniverse. In When Translation Goes Digital, ► pp. 121 ff.
2023. Negotiation, power and ethics in online collaborative translation: translation of “COVID-19” by Wikipedia translator-editors. The Translator► pp. 1 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 1 december 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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