Traduwiki from behind

We fixed some bugs this weekend. They were minor but blocked the access to some working functions. Unfortunately, we found ourselves guilty to have introduced them during a performance optimization session. Sorry for the delayed fix, we haven't spotted the problem until yesterday.

For those who want more technical details, here's how it's happened. Four days ago, we were testing new approaches of page extraction on the wiki core engine and have introduced some new variables to speed up internal calculation. The aim was to load pages a lot faster — and as you can check it, we made it — as well as bringing easier data administration for us. During the tests, we needed to disable some javascripts to measure the effects of tweaking actions, an usual step in this kind of process. Finally, the results were good enough to be used on traduwiki. But we forgot to put back previously disabled scripts. We know, we sucked.

So as a cooperative development, we'd appreciate a lot that you warn us if you spot something wrong on Traduwiki. You can use the contact form. Thanks.

"The clash of civilization is more like the clash of ignorances. When people from different cultures get to know each other better, there would be more pertinent policies and decisions."

By this short reflexion, Dominique Baudis, former chairman of the CSA, French Council of Audiovisual Monitor, and current curator of the IMA (Institut du Monde Arabe, Arabic Culture Institute) in Paris, France, indirectly answers to Samuel Huntington and his essay "Clash of Civilization". We totally agree with Mr. Baudis. The world isn't divided in two or three heavyweight, super blocs, jumping on each other to gain more power.

Up to now, when new comers want to check texts available on Traduwiki, they go to the Explore section. As it was built for this very single purpose, it looks like a simple page consisting of just a list of texts with a short description. It was pretty raw, and honestly, was pretty dull. Each time we thought about it, we thought it was time to change it, change not only the layout but also change it to integrate more thoughtful features — that's how we usually proceed and that's what you usually expect from a newer version. So go take a look at the new Explore page. It now features tags, a list of texts that attract the most of translation inputs, and gives a broader view of newly added texts. We are always opened to suggestions, so if you spot something wrong or want to see a new feature, drop some emails with the contact form.

If your interest in cinema makes you scan movie cast lists, you may have noticed that some of the characters of recent blockbuster productions are played by European actors. Mads Mikkelsen played the bad guy in Casino Royale. It was his first appearance on the international scene. Before that, the Danish actor made most of his career in northern Europe, appeared in small and brilliant movies like After the wedding (check his IMDb profile). Not the same age, but the same fate, Gaspard Ulliel incarnated Hannibal Lecter in the last settlement of the Hannibal movie franchise... I remember spotting this talented French 20-something-year-old actor when he began in Le Pacte des Loups or Embrassez qui vous voudrez. And what about Monica Bellucci and Lambert Wilson? They were Persephone and Merovingian in Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolution. Two other illustrations of what the movie industry is doing nowadays.

Does Hollywood lack of talented actors? It could be but I doubt that, because the current socio-economical situation is to multicultural match-ups. Movie producers are catching on with the "Think global, act local" rule. In order to reach more international audience, their movies need to show local faces, bring in some French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Indian or whatever alien blood. And it's not that bad — check out Brokeback mountain directed by Taiwanese director Ang Lee.

In the Internet, this situation lies since its genesis as the word "Internet" stands for "inter-network" but also for "international network". Bloggers who want to expand their site into a profitable micro-publication know it too well. Seth Godin, who is praised as a marketing guru, tips people to "write in English... better, write in Chinese" in a long post entitled "How to get more traffic for your blog". Again, for the same reason: the world is shrinking but it turns out the small village is full of people speaking different languages.

To fill the gap, translation machines aren't enough because they're not evolving and coping with cultural evolutions faster enough. Of course, you could guess the alternative is Traduwiki. After all, Traduwiki's mission is to enable real people fill the gap between cultures by themselves. But the real thing is, Traduwiki is just a drop in the ocean of what could be done. We need more innovative services, something that will interconnect between networks and medias to give more speed and accuracy to our daily conversations. Something that can react as fast as we do, and change as we want. Something for example like a instant messaging service that is able to translate while we write. We're far from there, but we truly believe we need more of those services. The results would be people knowing each other better, and that's not too much of a cliché.

Update, Oct. 29 — We did what we said. Everything is working fine now. Thanks for catching up with us.

If you checked Traduwiki yesterday through its main page, we may have noticed an error in the monitor box on its left side. That was ugly, like a black dot in the middle of the face or whatever. The problem? A script, unable to handle the name of the page appropriately. But by this morning, it has been rewritten. No bug and no contributions lost — this news goes directly to "Keneida", who was the first to work on this text and also our first translator into Polish. If you spot some other strange behaviors, weirdnesses on traduwiki, please write to us (thuan [x] traduwiki.org). We monitor as much as we can all the functionalities; sometimes, our eyes are just too tired to find out anything.

Another update: We're beefing the submit function up. Longer texts will be soon be handled correctly. It should have been done by now; we're sorry to be a little late. During the process, our computer running on Windows XP clashed with our Fon router. A serious and unexpected clash that took a day to be fixed. Damn you bad Windows? Damn you black boxed operating system? Actually no, thank you Windows. You helped us get the very good occasion to get away from you and enter the realm of open source softwares. For now on, we'll be running on OpenSuse 10.3, powering a speedy, beautiful and efficient KDE — which by the way looks like the Mac OS X.

So again, sorry for this extra delay, new enhancements will appear on Traduwiki pretty soon. This will be our last message of this kind. We're heading back to our roadmap.

Besides being faster and funnier, saying translating in group decreases everyone's effort. The assumption is logical, obvious or logical, at least, when translating with others people doesn't mean "Why have you replaced my version?!? Mine was excellent!"

Any of you who tried (online) collaboration knows it just too well. The situation might occur on Traduwiki too, and that's why we don't want it to happen every minute. So during the last four days, we built an annotation module that we released today. And no, it's not just a comment this text feature.

The previous screen shots tell you where you can ignite them. There now are three ways to add your input. At first, you can traditionally comment an entire text (spot 1). Just go on the discussion page of your desired language and fill the form. But you can also leave an annotation on a specific page (spot 2) and on every single section of the text (spot 3). All those sticky notes will land on a sort of annex page that you can check every time you think it's necessary.

We hope and believe the three layers of annotation can bring a lot to the quality of translations. But it's not all; we're preparing another module, a cool one, a module to boost conversation over a text in a more instantaneous way. There still is a lot of a work to be done before launching it — but we're already on it.

Those who have already edited a wiki know it well. When two or more users are editing the same article, usually, the first to update is lucky and the rest, unlucky. The reason? "Conflict resolution." The system warns the rest of the group with the same information, that the text they're editing has changed, so they should validate their text according to the changes or bypass the message and keep writing on the old version.

To avoid this situation, some wiki engines lock the page. To us, the technique is even worse, turning a wiki page editable one user at a time. It's like playing a symphony instrument by instrument.

On the other hand, we observed an interesting behavior, that editors don't jump on the same text section most of the time. They read the original text, pick the section that seems easy to translate, and usually, it's not the same — we don't react the same way to a phrase. That's how we came to develop a simultaneous editor.

"Brick saving"

In practice, you won't notice any difference than before. You keep translating with the same click-and-write procedure. Under the hood, there have been big changes. Instead of recording a whole page, we focus on the freshly edited section, spot its right position, and insert it right there without moving the rest. It's like changing a brick in a wall, without breaking it apart.

The saving tactic smooths the whole process. First, no more warning message. Second, users are always working with the up-to-date version of a translation. At this point, we're close to real-time editing and real-time editing is our target.

For the next few days, you'll see more special effects on texts. They will be here to help you get informed of what other editors are doing in the same time as you. So be just a bit patient, we'll get you something really cool to use.

The easier editions will be, the faster translations will be finished. That's the first issue that we care about at Traduwiki. The second one is the more accurate translations will be, the more people would benefit from them. So the last couple of days, we digged into Ajax to build a simpler way to add your input into a translation. It's nifty, and it's not to follow the current trend. We chose it because we now can provide you a translate form without leaving the original page. No more back and forth between the input form and the original text, translations within the context makes translations clearer.

A good news never comes alone

Besides this, the edit form will be a lot easier to handle with some WYSIWYG features. You would be able to style the text without any knowledge of the Wiki markups, as if you were editing a text on Open Office or Microsoft Word. Why did it take us so long to think about it? Because we were seeking a ready-made plugin that fits our needs, we thought that there must be a tool like that out there but so far, we have been quite disappointed to see there aren't any. So we decided to build our own.

When the new feature will appear?

The releases will be made in two steps. The first one is for the Ajax-based shortcut editing mode and it should be done before the end of the next week. The second one takes a bit more time, requires one more week to be tested in depth. Meanwhile, keep us aware of what new features you'd like to see and what enhancements could be made on Traduwiki to make this service a lot cooler to you.

UPDATE: With a couple of times late, both functionalities are now available on every page. We delayed the release of the Ajax sort of shortcut editing to rewrite it (again) and merge into the second one. We also rearranged some icons and tweaked the Traduwiki logo. Happy translations everyone!

Our last weekend was devoted to retooling the site to welcome eight new languages. You'll find the new view in wikipage header section and on clicked, you'll see the new list of languages that now includes Russian, Greek, Turkish and Chinese among others.

Why and how did we choose those languages? There's no secret, by user demand. People keeps writing to us about the language restriction and to be clear on this, if you find that a language is missing — like Hebrew that we're working on —, just drop us a message with the contact box. We will include them in the next batch of new additions.

Adding new languages also implies a reformated layout of status pages. We opted for a list that could provide the following advantages:

• Users should and could scan the version list faster.
• Jumping to a language should be possible within a click.
• Display a dozen languages while keeping the layout clean.

The result yield in a list that looks like the previous one. All the languages show up by clicking on the [...] icon. Some visual enhancement effects are on their way to Traduwiki. They will help you to navigate faster. We're taking some times to implement, are cautiously working on them as we don't want multiple scripts to slow the download time of some pages, and above that, as we think Traduwiki is your site.

Thanks for all the users who support us. We hope you like it as much as we do!

The time has come. Today we begin to open the kimono on Traduwiki. We build the site with this frustration in mind, that there are (so) many interesting docs available for free on the Web which could reach a broaden audience if there were translated. Usually, the situation is: you read a nice review on a blog, you are interested to read further, you click and lands on a German page. ("mensch!") Usually, your second action is to go on BabelFish or Google Translate to get a rough translation of the text. But if you've tried to read a German publication with Google Translate, you know how inaccurate it is.

It's how we ended up with Traduwiki, which a wiki (like Wikipedia, for instance) to share efforts on the translation and to enhance translation quality by the time. Anybody is welcome, anybody could contribute, anybody can translate.

Anybody can translate

By saying anybody can translate, we really mean it. Traduwiki hashes each text into smaller chunks. They're limited to 2 phrases maximum. Each text contains lots of short, easy to understand phrases. Usually, those phrases are grouped together. Even though you think you don't know master a language enough to use it, you can get the meaning of those phrases and thus, are able to translate them.

Scenarios

Traduwiki was built to satisfy common scenarios like:

• Read Karl's texts without having to ask him to write in your own language
• Help local physicist Paola reach a broaden audience
• Impress your high-profile teacher by practicing your foreign language
• Understand foreign language better by comparing the original and its translated version
• See how many people can help you improve your spoken language
• Review all the texts tagged "Elections 2007"

Traduwiki helps any kind of texts and authors. People here don't translate only for them, they do for their friends, their parents, their neighbors or the unknown guy sitting over there at the cybercafé. They truly understand that the Internet has no geographic boundaries, and that they are contributing to take down its last one, the language barrier.

Copyrights

As a start, Traduwiki will be providing books and text documents under an open source license or one of the Creative Commons licenses. It's not we don't want any fights over the copyrights of a text, but we think open source is the way to go for spreading the culture and knowledge.

Translated texts will de facto remain freely accessible to all on traduwiki.org. We'll also provide some other formats in the future, like the PDF. They'll remain free to download and distribute.

Testing period

We tried as much as possible to keep the site and its functionalities simple to handle. You can judge by yourself that within three clicks, you can jump on a text to translate. But still, we know that Traduwiki could be enhanced. If you have some remarks, noticed some bugs, please contact us. Thanks a million and let's wiki translate!