Calling all Spanish Speakers

When the Church has need of help from the technology community, we will post that need in this forum.
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WelchTC
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#31

Post by WelchTC »

thedqs wrote:I heard that the church is developing a collaborative curriculum content manager. Would the community be allowed a limited access (levels 2-4) to help in the translation?
These "levels" where my creation and may not be in sync with what the curriculum department is doing. However their intent is to figure out how we can use the community as well. So this test will help them understand how the community can participate.

Tom
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WelchTC
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#32

Post by WelchTC »

The Earl wrote:What do you mean by "publish" in 1,2? If a translation is available on a public wiki site in a partial state, is that 'published'? For 3, would we vote on a translation, or just wait till it was stable? Would the wiki even be considered an official source for completed translations?
What I meant by "published" is that the content was put in it's end state. So, if we had someone translate a piece of a web page, that content would be published back to the page it is intended to reside on.
I really don't think a forum works well for this task. It makes much more sense to put it in a hierarchical structure with the original language document at the root, and the translations as children. As language translations are added, they are simply added as new children to the original document.
Yes, the forums were only used for this test. I didn't want to do a lot of work for nothing.

Tom
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thedqs
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#33

Post by thedqs »

tomw wrote:Yes, the forums were only used for this test. I didn't want to do a lot of work for nothing.

Tom

So how was the reception of the test or are we still waiting for more people to refine the translations?
- David
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WelchTC
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#34

Post by WelchTC »

thedqs wrote:So how was the reception of the test or are we still waiting for more people to refine the translations?
I've sent the translations over for verification but have not heard back yet. Thanks for those who helped. If there are others out there that want to contribute their translations...feel free!

Tom
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#35

Post by Kent Larsen-p40 »

Kent Larsen wrote:The Earl, Mediawiki seemed like the solution to me, at first, but then when I tried to set it up for another project, I couldn't make it work.

However, I recently discovered the Proofread Page extension for Mediawiki, which seems to solve the problem I saw. It gives the opportunity to put an image of text on one side of the page with a box where the text of the translation can be entered on the other side of the page.

For anyone interested, I was able to get a collaborative translation system up and running using Mediawiki.

See MormonTranslation.com
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KGBurton
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#36

Post by KGBurton »

One general rule used by the Church translation dept is that documents are translated into the translator's native language, ie, if my native language is spanish and I know english and portuguese, I can translate into spanish from english and portuguese. At least where the pool of translators is large enough. You might want to track the translator's native language and birth country (some regions of the world have unique vocabulary constraints).
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#37

Post by charly3358-p40 »

The above is critical information.

There are huge differences between 'understanding' a different language, as many ex-missionaries do, to actually being able to communicate professionally in that language and then to be able to translate into that different language. The church seems to know this so they have that policy of translating only into ones native language.

If one ignores this one could end up have a 'google translator' standard of translation services!

By the way, any reply from the translation department yet??
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#38

Post by WelchTC »

I've not heard back. I'll ask again.

Tom
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What level of translation?

#39

Post by Kent Larsen-p40 »

charly3358 wrote: There are huge differences between 'understanding' a different language, as many ex-missionaries do, to actually being able to communicate professionally in that language and then to be able to translate into that different language. The church seems to know this so they have that policy of translating only into ones native language.

If one ignores this one could end up have a 'google translator' standard of translation services!
Yes. you are absolutely right.

However, documents are also translated for a wide variety of purposes.

I agree that the Church generally needs a high level of translation, and I'm not sure that this idea to have members of the community assist will give the Church a high enough level of translation. But, some compromise may give the Church more work done -- some system of training and oversight of volunteer translators may work very well.

Other (non-Church and non-publication) uses may not need as high a level of translation. I often find that Google translations of web pages give me a good enough understanding of a web pages that I can decide if the page is important to me.

I also use google translations as a first draft for many documents that I do translate.

And, perhaps most important of all, we must keep in mind the idea that the perfect is often the enemy of the good. Or, as the Brazilians say: Quem não tem cão, caça com gato. (If you don't have a dog, hunt with a cat.)

IMO, too much doesn't get translated at all because we have the idea that a Church-paid professional must do the translation. I think that members who speak languages other than English are often starved for Mormon materials, and are quite happy with a mediocre translation, warts and all, because the alternative is no translation.

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#40

Post by charly3358-p40 »

Yes, you have a point here.

I also start with google as a shortcut and edit the document out from there!

Maybe if the community has general rule of having native speakers translate into their own language we can avoid problemas, but then if documents are pilling up we could open them for everyone to do -including the ex missionaries :)

But can we just start next week or so translating these threads, newest to older? Done by anyone available? We are certain to get spanish, portuguese and probably tagalog too to start off with because wiki is set up as totally different systems per different languages.

(Would the church permit us to do so? because I get the impression that they are very concerned with what is written especially in church-linked sites and they seem to edit out things a lot)
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