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ABSTRACT
The Wikimedia Foundation is arguably the quintessential example of a socially responsible organisation: not-for-profit, dedicated to the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, the Foundation operates openly editable projects like Wikipedia, which now has anywhere from one to several million articles available in more than 280 languages. Wikimedia – the organisation that hosts and operates Wikipedia – does not appear to have an explicit translation policy. This paper therefore begins by assessing the organisation’s Language Proposal Policy and Wikipedia’s translation guidelines. Then, drawing on statistics from the Content Translation tool recently developed by Wikipedia to encourage translation within the various language versions, this paper applies the concept of linguistic justice to help determine how any future translation policies might achieve a better balance between fairness and efficiency, arguing that a translation policy can be both fair and efficient, while still conforming to the ‘official multilingualism’ model that seems to be endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Pym (Citation2011) suggests volunteer translation as an alternative for these conflicting terms, arguing that ‘If a professional translator is one who receives monetary reward, then the opposite term should be “volunteer” (qualifying the person, not the action). The alternative terms here [community translation, crowdsourcing, collaborative translation, CT3] seem shot through with activist ideologies, all of which are very well meant, and none of which highlight the most problematic feature concerned.’ (97). The problem with Pym’s proposal, though, is the focus on payment: Although many crowdsourced translation projects do involve non-monetary forms of reward for participants, it is possible to use platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome) to provide micropayments to Internet users who perform short language-related tasks like translating short sentences or rating the quality of translated sentences. (A task available in July 2015, for instance, asked Internet users to assess the quality of English to Arabic translations, at a rate of US$0.08 per translation. See https://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId = 3USMLONC9E3WAIX5R7L1LYP7JHZ85M for more details.) Although this would be an example of a crowdsourced translation task, it would not be an example of volunteer translation, because participants are being paid – whether this is a ‘professional’ rate is another question.
2. As of 26 December 2016, the List of Wikipedias page (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias) included 295 language editions: However, 11 of these were inactive versions that now exist only in the Wikipedia incubator. While there are therefore only 284 active language versions, this paper will use the 295 figure for convenience since all of these language versions are available in some form.
3. Waray-Waray is an interesting case of how a Wikipedia edition can be greatly expanded through the use of automated bots rather than a community of users: A significant number of the articles in this language edition were generated by a computer script created by a Wikipedia user who wanted make more information available to more people as efficiently as possible (Skinner Citation2014).
4. Lingua Franca Nova is an artificial language created in 1965 based on French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan. In the discussion about whether to create a new Wikipedia version for Lingua Franca Nova, supporters claimed the language had more than 100 speakers. For more details, see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_Lingua_Franca_Nova.
6. Summarised here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_policies.
7. The Wikimedia Foundation FAQ page (https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Template:Answers/Translate) has a link to the Wikipedia:Translate Us page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Translate_us).
9. Similar initiatives exist in other language version as well. For instance, Projet:Traduction in French Wikipedia: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Traduction.
10. In fact, with only 28 exceptions, English and/or Simple English served as an SL for at least one target text in each of the 248 target languages.
11. More detailed data tables are available on the author’s website: www.mcdonough-dolmaya.ca.
12. Sources that classify Internet users by language rely on different data to calculate their figures and as a result do not always rank languages in the same order, but English and Chinese speakers are often considered to comprise about half of all Internet users. See for example http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm.
13. The ‘Be Bold’ editing guideline, for instance, notes that ‘Wikis like ours develop faster when everybody helps to fix problems, correct grammar, add facts, make sure wording is accurate, etc. We would like everyone to be bold and help make Wikipedia a better encyclopedia.’ (original emphasis. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold).
14. Wikipedia’s Policies and Guidelines page describes itself as follows ‘[…] Wikipedia is a self-governing project run by its community. Its policies and guidelines are intended to reflect the consensus of the community.’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines.
15. Through the IdeaLab, Wikipedians have collaborated on problems such as how to solve harassment within Wikimedia projects. For more details, see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab.
16. The issues explored by this task force include ‘editor interaction, dispute resolution, how admins and the Arbitration Committee are chosen, how policies are written and enforced, which articles about women are created and deleted, and how those articles are written.’ For more details, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias/Gender_gap_task_force.
17. English Wikipedia already posts a random feature article on its homepage: this solution would be similar, except that the featured article would be in a different language.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Julie McDonough Dolmaya
Julie McDonough Dolmaya teaches in the School of Translation at York University’s Glendon campus. Her research interests range from translation, politics and oral history to translation in digital spaces, particularly crowdsourcing. She has published articles on these topics in Meta, The Translator, Translation Studies, Target and others. She has been the Secretary of the Canadian Association for Translation Studies since 2009, the Review Editor of the Interpreter and Translator Trainer since 2011, and a member of the IATIS Executive Council since 2016. She blogs about her teaching and research at www.mcdonough-dolmaya.ca.