Betawiki talk:Translator

[edit] Vetting of translators

It seems to me that just anyone is allowed to become a translator. Please direct yourself to for example [1] where it says in Bislama, "I love Bislama, but I can't speak it well". Or Tauʻolunga, whose userpage on to.wp lists their level of mastery of to: as 1. What sort of a mess will these people leave for native or expert speakers of these languages to clean out? Hobbyists with poor masteries of languages may have been allowed to overtake certain Wikipedias, but they should certainly not be allowed to edit their localizations. With a simple check of the userpages of new and existing translators, their status can often be confirmed. The vast majority of translators here appear to be native speakers, but some do not appear to have obvious qualifications. Even in cases for example where an Icelandic guy lists himself as ce-3 or a German guy lists himself as qu-3, I think we should ask these people at least how they learnt these languages and for how long they have been studying them.

Otherwise, by letting these people translate hundreds of messages, we could be leaving a wide trail of poorly-translated messages that may discourage potential contributors not only to the localizations but to the Wikis at which they are used. Comment left by User:149.169.57.234

This is an interesting question. The following is my own opinion.

I myself prefer quality over quantity. However this is an issue we don't have any means that both practical and socially acceptable. First, none of us is capable of determining the skill of an translator in his language. We also don't have resources to have a third party to do this. The only practical solution is to allow anyone to translate and hope the language team can assembly itself so that it works.

What comes to the social thing: this is open source. Anyone is allowed to contribute, no papers asked. We can't go and require people to send qualification proofs (if they even have any). Also, we cant know how people will react whe nthey see poor translation work. Some people will just use some other language, some will turn away, but some will want to fix it.

I would not call the result mess that needs to be cleaned. If it is rubbish, we can remove it. If it just poorly done, it is easier to improve it than to start from zero. - Nike 22:16, 20 December 2007 (UTC)