[Olpc-Haiti] [RE] Where to find Haitian Kréyol professional translators

[Michel DeGraff]

Dear Chris,

Thank you for your clarification re the "publishing" process of the
translations and the "quality control mechanisms" therein.

>  Differing levels of privileges, review with some
> automated error checking to identify possible problems, contributions 
> to the Pootle server are not "published" to the software repo until a 
> language
> administrator "commits" the particular PO file.

This, then, entails that the eventual quality of the final "committed"
translations will be commensurate with the competence of the "language
administrator."

When I was looking at the committed Kreyòl translations on some XOs a
couple of years ago, I was shocked by the extremely low quality of the
translation, some of which was downright confusing for any Kreyòl
speaker, including fluent adult speakers like myself.  I reported these
glitches to the OLPC-Haiti team at the time.

Then I found out that the language administrator at that time was not
even fluent in Kreyòl.

Hopefully the current language administrators are certifiably competent
professional translators who are duly remunerated for their much needed
expertise and their hard work, on a par with other employees and
consultants working for OLPC.

It was good to hear from Guy-Serge Pompilus that translations done in
Haiti are now ready for a final check---perhaps by the sort of language
administrators I just mentioned.

Well done, Guy Serge!  (Kenbe rèd. Fòk nou pa kite kochma sa a kraze
moral nou nèt. Fòk nou kontinye viv, fòk nou kontinye goumen pou
zansèt ki te ban nou peyi a, pou moun ki mouri yo, pou ti moun k ap
grandi yo, pou ti moun ki pral fèt yo.  Kouraj!)

                                 -michel.
_____________________________________________________________________
MIT Linguistics & Philosophy  77 Massachusetts Ave Cambridge MA 02139
degraff at MIT.EDU http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/degraff
_____________________________________________________________________



----- Message from cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com ---------
    Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2010 02:10:19 -0500
    From: Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com>
Reply-To: Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Olpc-Haiti] [RE] Where to find Haitian Kréyol profes
sional translators
      To: Adam Holt <holt at laptop.org>


> On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 1:30 AM, Adam Holt <holt at laptop.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> Clarifying Question: is it true that all OLPC/Sugar translation has been
>> completed by 600+ volunteers to date?  That was my impression, but I could
>> be wrong,
>> --Adam
>>
>
> I believe that all translations are from volunteers. Each language group has
> the opportunity to organize itself and control the process as they see fit.
> For example, Nepali translations have been provided by the very organized
> team from OLE Nepal.  A number of the languages (pidgins) in Oceania share
> some of the challenges of Haitian Kreyol in that they are not richly
> described as written languages and they are controlled by designees from
> OLPC Oceania for harmonization of the written forms.
>
> One of the beauty of open source tools like Pootle is that while they are
> well-designed to accept input from a broad community of participants, they
> still have significant quality control mechanisms that can be employed to
> achieve high quality.  Differing levels of privileges, review with some
> automated error checking to identify possible problems, contributions to the
> Pootle server are not "published" to the software repo until a language
> administrator "commits" the particular PO file.  Of course any individual
> string translation can be reviewed and corrected easily by changing it and
> re-committing the PO file.
>
> Open source and community driven does not equate to uncontrolled and low
> quality.  It is simply a different path to quality than a highly controlled
> centralized top-down approach.
>
> cjl
>


----- End message from cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com -----