The What
Inspired largely by The Palestinian Youth Movement’s communal translation of Trinity of Fundamentals from Arabic to English, I am eager to create a platform where diasporic communities can upload existing texts and work on their translations in community.
A lot of software translation tools seem primarily concerned with translation at scale – translating many texts, or into many languages, or crowdsourcing translations, or building translational memory over many different translations. This proposal differs fundamentally in that it is concerned with the pedagogy of communal translation – creating a place for members to work and decide on translations together, and treating the process of translation as its own important text.
Last semester for an Introduction to Translation course, I wrote a paper that examined translation theories of “diaspora as translation” and “translation as pedagogy,” and applied them to the specifics of Afghan linguistic and literary contexts.
For the fourteen work weeks of this praxis course, the focus will be on building and deploying a prototype tool that allows users to:
- upload a static document
- create an associated document where they collaborate on a translation of the original document
- add comment threads on the translation
The How
The Team
- Alex Millatmal – Lead developer responsible for:
- back-end, API, and rich-text editor schema development
- co-defining front-end and other development tasks
- OPEN – (1) UI/UX developer responsible for working — primarily with React (JavaScript library) and CSS — on implementing designs and fine-tuning usability of the software
- OPEN – (1) Project manager responsible for:
- posting weekly team updates to the class blog
- overseeing that each deliverable’s work stream remains on track and removing any obstacles to work
- OPEN – (1) Designer responsible for researching existing comparable software examples, finalizing wireframes, and defining UI/UX requirements
The following roles are smaller in scope and can be distributed among the above team members:
- User tester responsible for quality assurance of the software as it is built and deployed
- Researcher responsible for learning and advising on best technical practices for features like file uploading, text editor support across languages, etc.
Project Timeline
I propose we work in two-week sprints over the course of the semester:
- Feb 10 – 23
- project scope definition
- research
- wire-framing
- * Feb 24 – Mar 9
- development phase 1 (technical foundations)
- * Mar 10 – 23
- development phase 1 (technical foundations)
- paper outlining and drafting
- * Mar 24 – Apr 6
- user testing of deployed prototype
- paper outlining and drafting
- Apr 7 – 20
- development phase 2 (refining UI; additional features)
- Apr 21 – May 4
- development phase 2 (refining UI; additional features)
- May 5 – 18
- dress rehearsal
- project polishing
- finalize paper
- showcase!
* denote sprints taking place over Ramadan
The Why
The idea for this academic exploration came from on of my WhatsApp group chats. A question about what translation means to our Afghan diasporic community turned into a sprawling conversation about: who is translated (and why and by whom); what texts we would like to read more closely and the barriers to accessing them; the inspiration of Palestinians learning political theory from their own history; and the way that the family archive pushes us to connect with and learn our heritage languages. As is often the case with this tenor of conversation, each participant had a piece of the puzzle — one had access to hard-to-find texts, another had time to scan the documents, another had language fluency, another had contact with elders doing regular work on translation projects.
What would it mean for us Afghans (and other communities) in diaspora to learn from our own textual histories through the act of communal translation?
Beyond this semester, I’m interested in applying and extending these ideas as a means of moving beyond the static nature of the digital archive, which I find frustrating and limiting. For the kinds of technology and computing we have at our disposal, is the most transformative thing we can do with the archive to digitize and disseminate its materials? Following diaspora studies scholar Ipek Demir, what does it mean for the agency of the archival subject — particularly the kind of dual-subject of the diasporic viewer — to be able to translate, interpret, and annotate archival materials in-place, to make meaning against the archival grain?
Working at the level of software also allows us to think about translation choices at the very granular levels of words, annotations, texts, and hyper texts. I have professional software engineering background working in rich-text editors and content management systems, and deeply enjoy the philosophical exercise of thinking about how to model the data that supports content and its various metadata in ways that bring functionality to the document that is uniquely-achieved in a digital realm. From an academic perspective, I’m interested in the ways these additional layers of functionality and metadata open up possibilities for multiplicities of meaning in the documents themselves, and how interaction with the documents can become their own important texts and sites of cross-generational exchange and education.
Hi Alexandra! This idea sounds incredible, and I love the idea of building community through this intellectual exchange. Do you have more specific goals between each of the development phases? Also, are there any sample documents that you plan to use to build up this site for now, or would you collect them as you move forward?
Great work, and I’ll see you tomorrow!
Hi Alex, this project idea would be very empowering put into practice, for so many communities, too. I really like the idea of constructing contemporary translations based around shared histories and experiences. I’m curious how you roughly imagine the U/X to appear and function, and also whether regional variations in a language could be managed.
I’m excited to hear your pitch in class!
Hi, both! Thank you for your comments.
I have some ideas about the UI/UX — working in rich-text editing on the web, Google Docs is often a sort of North Star — but want to allow the group to work on this iteration of the project together! I picture working through a few wireframes during the first week of project work and deciding the work from there.
I haven’t quite delineated this out yet and want the work to be responsive to the ideation and wire-framing the group would do together in the first sprint of the project. But I do have experience sequencing development work and building features like these, so I feel confident about spreading it out in a way that feels reasonable. One thought I have is creating a site with users and document upload for the first phase, and then adding in a rich-text editor with comment threads in the second phase.
I think so! I guess I see this as being something the community working on the translation might decide together. In the future I could even see there being the addition of a feature like “import your own spellcheck/dictionary and add words to it as you work” though that would be out of scope for the time we have this semester.
This is also something I wanted to be responsive to the team that works on this project. I initially thought about this project with regards to my own community, but I think it would be nice this semester to work in a language that is relevant to a plurality of the group. Also, for the first iteration of this project, it would be helpful to work in a language that has the same alphabet/characters as English.
Something that would also be helpful for the researcher to work on would be finding texts of interest that are licensed in such a way that we can legally upload them, and possibly thinking through approaches to users uploading copyrighted or otherwise restricted materials.
Thanks for the responses, Alex! Also, I meant to add how I really like that you’ve questioned the impact of traditional online archives given there is so much more we can do.
Hello Alex,
I love your pitch.
I volunteered at the Smithsonian transcription project (https://transcription.si.edu/tips) and was very impressed with the way the volunteer program was setup. They have clear instructions on the transcription, review and approval process. Volunteers log in, choose a project, choose to transcribe or review and then submit their work. The reviews are also done by volunteers.
Since my own proposal involved user input, I have been considering the review requirements. I thought you might want to have a look at the Smithsonian effort to see if any of their processes might be useful to your project.
Thanks for this, Lini!
This is really interesting! Please let me know if I’m mis-interpreting your comment, but I don’t view the main outcome of this platform to be a centralized repository of reviewed/correct translations (and therefore needing a systemized process of submission and review). Rather, I see it as a way for communities to work deeply on translation in situ with an original document, and build a repository of knowledge through debate and conversation.
This leads me to think about when (or whether!) a translation is considered “finished” and who makes that decision. This feels like a very important consideration, but I think one that is out of scope for this iteration of the project.
Hi Alex,
As someone who’s majored in other language I find this proposal very fascinated. Have you decided what the best for of outreach would be? Also, given that the idea is to translate in community, is there any thoughts on how it will be presented n the website for the users?
I forgot to mention, I really like your detailed proposal, it’ll serve as a great timeline of where you should be in the project
Thanks for your question, Julissa.
Honestly, I don’t think that the project that is possible within the scope of this semester will be ready for use by the wider public, so I imagine outreach would largely just be within DH communities for now.
I do have hopes of using a beta version of this software on my own upcoming translation projects and potentially putting a more-polished version in front of my own community in the future.
I’m not sure I understand this question fully, maybe we can talk about it tonight during class!