The Cross-Lingual Wiki Engine

Abstract

In this paper, we present the Cross-Lingual Wiki Engine (CLWE), a system designed to support concurrent, collaborative authoring and translation of content in multiple languages. We start by showing how collaborative translation differs from conventional translation environments. In particular, we show how conventional industrial translation processes and tools are based on assumptions that often do not hold in collaborative environments. We then provide a detailed storyboard which shows how the CLWE can be used by groups of users, to collaboratively author and translate content without having to make those assumptions. We then discuss the implementation of the CLWE's change tracking infrastructure, which turns out to be the critical component in enabling this sort of open-ended translation workflow. We show how the problem of tracking changes in multiple languages at once can be greatly simplified using abstract change tokens which are independent of language and textual content. The system has been deployed in several communities, including SUMO (the Firefox documentation site), and preliminary feedback is encouraging.