Supporting multilingual discussion for collaborative translation

Abstract

In recent years, collaborative translation has become more and more important for translation volunteers to share knowledge among different languages, among which Wikipedia translation activity is a typical example. During the collaborative translation processes, users with different mother tongues always conduct frequent discussions about certain words or expressions to understand the content of original article and to decide the correct translation. To support such kind of multilingual discussions, we propose an approach to embedding a service-oriented multilingual infrastructure with discussion functions in collaborative translation systems, where discussions can be automatically translated into different languages with machine translators, dictionaries, and so on. Moreover, we propose a Meta Translation Algorithm to adapt the features of discussions for collaborative translation, where discussion articles always consist of expressions in different languages. Further, we implement the proposed approach on LiquidThreads, a BBS on Wikipedia, and apply it for multilingual discussion for Wikipedia translation to verify the effectiveness of this research.