Can the Language Community Embrace Collaborative Commons and Survive?




Greater than 5 minutes, my friend!

When Albert Einstein said: “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change”, he was referring neither to the internet nor to localization. Today the language community is facing one of its most serious threats and should pay attention to Einstein’s famous quote. The need to adapt to a new monetization reality is indisputable and the trend of Collaborative Commons is the new enabler.

Jeremy Rifkin in his new book “The Zero Marginal Cost Society” states that our economic and social systems are rapidly transforming into Collaborative Commons with far-reaching implications. Specifically he says that: “In this new world, social capital is as important as financial capital, access trumps ownership, sustainability supersedes consumerism, cooperation ousts competition, and “exchange value” in the capitalist marketplace is increasingly replaced by “shareable value” on the Collaborative Commons.”

The imperatives of technological change are so overwhelming in their reach that to defy adaptation is to risk irrelevance. This was clearly understood by the financial sector in adapting rapidly to provide online and mobile transactions. Yet as technology continues to evolve, those corporations that are adapting to offer continuously new products and services, will ensure continuity and relevance.

It is no secret, the internet is changing the way we think, do business and socialize. Automation not only creates tools to facilitate business processes but in some cases, it replaces these same processes. There is fear that jobs will be lost and futurologists debate how this new world will affect us. The Language Community is not the only sector that is affected by automation. But it is a sector that already has embraced the coming changes and will be able to adjust accordingly. The large consensus of the language community believes that automation has not affected jobs but rather has created its own opportunities for translating documents that due to volume, relevance or time sensitivity, would have never been part of the regular translation/localization process.

An initiative which is already an open source software collaboration and has contributed to many commercialized MT versions is MosesCore. MosesCore is an EU-funded Coordination Action, which brings together academic and commercial partners sharing a common interest in open source machine translation. MosesCore aims to encourage the development and usage of open source machine translation tools by coordinating and supporting the development of open source software for machine translation, notably the Moses statistical MT toolkit.

These initiatives, addressing either software or linguistic quality, are all indicative of the new era of free information through Collaborative Commons. For the Language Community to survive into the new era, we need to address some fundamental issues, which have been roadblocks for collaboration amongst stakeholders, overcome them and work in a symbiotic manner.

Linguists were threatened when machine translation became a viable product. Some translators have already modified their role into pre- or post-editing, which is only one of many opportunities waiting to be taken in an open collaborative community. Yet linguists can find themselves struggling to contend with the very technologies that are rapidly transforming the worldwide language environment.

Another issue that needs to be addressed is that industry giants are creating data repositories driven by the few commercially viable languages. We will soon find that languages, which are not deemed commercially attractive, will be left behind with vast cultural consequences. An exception to this are the large internet companies which have understood that their company voice will be served better if fully localized, with a handful of them today supporting nearly 200 languages.

Emily Underwood in an article posted on the internet “Languages Are Being Wiped Out By Economic Growth” quotes the following statistical research: “The world’s roughly 7000 known languages are disappearing faster than species, with a different tongue dying approximately every 2 weeks. Now, by borrowing methods used in ecology to track endangered species, researchers have identified the primary threat to linguistic diversity: economic development. Though such growth has been shown to wipe out language in the past on a case-by-case basis, this is the first study to demonstrate that it is a global phenomenon, researchers say”.

The urgency with which these requirements need to be addressed is increased by the rate of progress in developing computer technology. This situation will only increase and it is critical for our community that we maximize our ability to make full use of the opportunities this will create.

Collaborative Commons not only can address these issues, it may easily provide the opportunity to fix them.

Rob Howard, Chief Technology Officer of Zimbra in his article “Debunking the top open source myths” in NetworkWorld on Sep 5, 2014, states: “Today many IT executives choose open source over proprietary software for everything from cloud computing to facilitating teamwork among remote workers. Open source increases security and privacy, encourages an engaged community and offers the ability to “look under the hood” to diagnose and resolve issues quickly. The incentive to be more open pays off in all aspects of business, from customer relationships to new technologies. Embarking on open source initiatives sends a strong message about your organization’s commitment to this plan. An open source project will flourish with strong input, active collaboration and boundless creative thinking at its core, and its results can yield market success in ways a proprietary software route is unable to touch.”

We should learn from successful models of Collaborative Commons, one of which is none other than Wikipedia. Wikipedia, today on its 13th year, is ranked within the top 5 internet sites. As Wikimedia Foundation founder Jimmy Wales put it: “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.” Wikipedia is not a traditional organization. It’s a global movement. The core of its content is contributed by thousands of volunteers worldwide. This volunteer community is supported by a network of organizations, with theWikimedia Foundation at its center, working in partnership with geographically focused local chapters in 41 countries. It’s the volunteer community that enables them to accomplish so much.

Our Language Community will benefit from a global nonprofit organization offering a platform for all stakeholders (localization engineers, academics and linguists) to communicate in Collaborative Commons, helping create open, accessible tools and data in order to ensure continuity and growth in the emerging technological reality.

The creation of a global language organization a Translation Commons which will bring together the expertise of the world’s engineers, linguists and academics converging in the common goal of enabling digital support for all the world’s languages.

Its mission will be to raise the awareness of language technology among linguists and to enhance the cooperation with technology engineers. It will initiate and organize programs to educate, support and provide adapted tools for all spoken languages in order to ensure all linguists, languages and cultures participate fully in this revolutionary new age.

Translation Commons can be a central repository where everyone will contribute equally to share data and technology. Projects and initiatives already underway can openly share and benefit from the increased data and knowledge. Translation Commons will be contacting, organizing, categorizing, showcasing and linking together the large number of existing valuable language technology projects to create new opportunities.

In short, Translation Commons will undertake all necessary activities to stimulate access, creation and sharing of language data and technology which will help usher the new era of Collaborative Commons for our community.

To paraphrase Jimmy Wales words “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge, in all languages!”

Everyone who believes that translation in every language should be available to everyone, everywhere, join us in the efforts to make this a reality!

The challenge is there for the taking. The vision is achievable. A shared commons is the enabler.

Jeannette Stewart

About Jeannette Stewart

The translation industry belongs to the translators and they should have the power to make decisions that affect their daily work.

4 thoughts on “Can the Language Community Embrace Collaborative Commons and Survive?

  1. Very well written and visionary. I would love to be so optimistic and such initiatives are possible and will take a lot of time, but there will always remain opportunistic stakeholders with personal gains in mind. If only there were more illuminated people, with generous hearts…

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    1. Thank you Stefan for your kind words! The same time I wrote this post (LinkedIn Pulse September 2014) I also started the process for a nonprofit. A LinkedIn group was formed to explore the community response, in 20 days 1000 people signed up! The nonprofit materialized in November 2015. Right now Translation Commons is creating a technical advisory committee and will spend the next 3-6 months securing funding and grants for a website and specific community projects. There are already multiple projects on the go that we are trying to secure funding, 2 internship programs for linguistic students and computer science students, an open source CAT tool OmegaT feature development, the creation of a mentoring standard for freelance translators, and more. All of these have derived from within the community. Yes, it will take a long time but it can be done! Keeping the opportunists away is important. The great lesson I learned through this last year is that we have a great community that people care for and want to do something to make sure it becomes a thriving community.

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