Architecture for Collaborative Translation Synchronization

As part of the Cross Lingual Wiki Engine Project, an architecture to track changes across translations had to be created. The purpose of the architecture is to allow concurrent modi cation of any of the translated pages, track the changes and their propagation. The architecture does not attempt to control the content ow or to restrict it. However, it can be used to provide information about the state of the translation at any point in time. The architecture is based on the fact that each language has its own dedicated page and that page histories are independent. This architecture was implemented as part of the multilingual support in TikiWiki. The mechanisms rely on human translation of the content. No machine translation is considered. This document explains the theory behind the architecture as well as the implementation details. Explanations are built around a sample case. In explaining the implementation, many ways to express the theory are used.