Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2022-2023/Goal 4/Translations and Interpretation
 | This page is kept for historical interest. Any policies mentioned may be obsolete. This work was completed as part of the Annual plan for FY 2022-23. Further updates will be at organisation communications translators page. |
Connecting the dots
As part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Annual Plan, this year we want to spend time on internal initiatives to ‘connect the dots’ with a focus on increasing effectiveness and identifying content areas where more coordinated approaches can deliver more impact without necessarily more resources.
Many departments of the Foundation solve the same problems over and over, sometimes similarly but inefficiently, sometimes in idiosyncratic ways. This scattered approach makes it difficult to assess organization-wide impact and learn from experience.
One of the starting points is to improve translation and interpretation support across the foundation. Looking at current resource allocation at the Wikimedia Foundation shows that significant language support is already being provided by most teams. Yet, this happens through an array of external vendors, contractors, and volunteers. Time frames, languages, and technical expertise will not allow for a one-size-fits-all model, but a more connected approach will enable us to identify better ways to expand our language support in line with the values of a global community.
People, process and tools
Multi-linguism is a super-power for our movement. In order to make the most of the language investment already being made in the Foundation we need to look at people, process and tools and how they are each supporting our commitment to multi-linguism.
This initiative to connect the dots does not include knowledge translation on the projects (e.g. Wikipedia articles) within its scope - that work is already being done by the Language team at the foundation - but will focus on improving language support for movement facing communications from the foundation.
We know that bringing consistency to how people, processes and tools support multi-linguism will take some time. Translations and interpretations will never be perfect but in the wiki way we will iterate and adapt as we go along.
Pooling people together
We are beginning work to pool all the translators used across the foundation together into a single network. This should mean that instead of every team having a different set of languages they can or cannot support we will have one set across the foundation that all teams within the foundation can request.
Update as of January 2023: The organisation communications translators page now has the full list of 25 languages supported (up from 6 at the start of this financial year). This growth in the number of languages supported has come from pooling translators used across the organisation.
End of year update as of July 2023: The organisation communications translators page now has the full list of 30+ languages supported (up from 6 at the start of this financial year). This growth in the number of languages supported has come from pooling translators used across the organisation.
Harmonising processes
The foundation previously used a range of processes linked to volunteers. Differences ranged from rates of pay, types of contracts etc. Over the next few months, we will work to harmonise these processes. We will also look to scale previous attempts at a shared glossary and quality control. More details to follow.
Update as of January 2023: The organisation communications translators page sets out the process now used for translations for organisation communications. It has been harmonised across departments so a single framework is followed in the vast majority of cases.
Update as of July 2023: The process set out as part of the organisation communications translators page now in use in the vast majority of cases across the Foundation.
Better tools
At the moment, there is a lot of manual work involved in managing translations. Over the next few months, we will look at better tools to manage our processes. The priority will be to better use existing MediaWiki tools to manage workflows and have better training on these existing tools and resources across the foundation. More details to follow.
Update as of July 2023: The Languages team has now incorporated into their plans for the next fiscal year, improvements to translation tools.