Translation Wikified: How will Massive Online Collaboration Impact the World of Translation?

Massively collaborative sites like Wikipedia, YouTube and SecondLife are revolutionizing the way in which content is produced and consumed worldwide. These fundamentally collaborative technologies will have a profound impact on the way in which content is not only produced, but also translated. In this paper, we raise a number of questions that naturally arise in this new frontier of translation. Firstly, we look at what processes and tools might be needed to translate content that is constantly being edited collaboratively by a large, loosely coordinated community of authors. Secondly, we look at how translators might benefit from open, wiki-like translation resources. Thirdly, we look at whether collaborative semantic tagging could help improve Machine Translation by allowing large numbers of people to teach machines facts about the world. These three questions illustrate the various ways in which massive online collaboration might change the rules of the game for translation, by sometimes introducing new problems, sometimes enabling new and better solutions to existing problems, and sometimes introducing exciting new opportunities that simply were not on our minds before.