The Translation Studies MSc project 2020/2021 in a nutshell: When?: Wednesday 10th February 2021 1pm to 2pm Where?: Zoom online workshop. Point of contact: ewan.mcandrew@ed.ac.uk / Stinglehammer ( talk)

Have you ever wondered why the information in Wikipedia is extensive for some topics and scarce for others? Particularly in different language Wikipedias? Commencing on 10th February 2021 and concluding on Friday 14th May 2021, the University's Information Services team will run a Wikipedia translate-a-thon.

We will provide training on how to edit and participate in an open knowledge community. Participants will be supported to translate articles.

(Video) Introduction to the Content Translation tool (1 minute).

• 1,500 to 2,000 words to be translated from one language Wikipedia to another. This is per student so you can work in pairs/groups also.
• Article choices should be well-referenced. Inline citations peppering all the way through the article.
• Article selections must be emailed to me (ewan.mcandrew@ed.ac.uk) and your language tutor for approval.
• Email by 22nd February 5pm so that we can finally settle on article choices by 1st March 2021 ideally.
• Upload source article (with word count) and translated article (with word count) in MS Word format to Learn by 5pm on Friday April 23rd 2021.
• Peer review of another student's work to emailed to student and myself by 5pm on Friday 7th May 2021. Please consider commenting/annotating in MS Word/Google Doc.
• Article to be published to target Wikipedia w/c 10th May 2021 and no later than 5pm on Friday 14th May 2021.

• Sign up for the event using the Dashboard link here.
• Create a Wikipedia account
• Learn about editing if you like: Tutorial, or Getting started on Wikipedia for more information
• Think about what you would like to edit - please prepare some materials to bring with you on the day
• Resources for the project are available in this Google Drive folder here.

1. Use of the Content Translation tool is optional. If using this tool, publish to your Personal Draft space early so any template problems (citations, infoboxes, tables) can be addressed early. NB: I advise copying the article text of the source article from Edit Source mode into the Edit Source mode of your Sandbox/Personal draft in the target Wikipedia.
2. Wednesday afternoons I will be available for support with Office Hours this semester 5-6pm on Wednesdays for face-to-face video chats. I want you to be able to focus on the translation of the words more than formatting/programming issues so will be available for MS Teams calls to address issues face-to-face to help do this quickly.
3. Please add your username to the Dashboard by clicking this link so I can keep track of edits on the project.
4. Please also make sure you have added that you are a Translation student at University of Edinburgh to your user page on the source Wikipedia and the target Wikipedia. e.g. Jingwen's user page on English Wikipedia and Chinese Wikipedia.
5. If translating into Chinese Wikipedia then please check these common translation problemsand avoid using the Content Translation tool as its machine translation has been deemed problematic. Instead copy and paste into a Sandbox on Chinese Wikipedia e.g. My sandbox here. NB: I have consulted with Chinese Wikipedia editors and administrators about issues from last semester and we have agreed to work more collaboratively and supportively this semester. We all want your work published!

Further reading

The main policies and guidelines can be found at the following pages:

• Wikipedia:Five pillars
• Wikipedia:Neutral point of view
• Wikipedia:No original research
• Wikipedia:Verifiability
• Wikipedia:Conflict of Interest
• Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style

Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh

Please put your Wikipedia username in the space below:

• NoraAlbawardi

15 steps to translation success

1. The first step is to Create an account.
2. In the first session we will introduce you to Wikipedia, how to format a page and provide advice on articles to select for your assignment.
3. If not already done so the Content Translation tool must be enabled. This can be done in the Beta menu (top right corner of your screen). Once in the Beta menu, make sure the Content Translation option is ticked and then click Save (bottom left corner of your screen).
4. Now you need to select an article or articles to translate. The tools below (categories, portals, Gapfinder, Not in the other language) will help you decide. Importantly, it should be a high quality article (check the references being used) of suitable importance & subject matter.
5. Select your chosen article(s) by 5pm on Monday 22nd February 2021. The article you select must be approved by BOTH your course tutor AND Ewan McAndrew (email: ewan.mcandrew@ed.ac.uk) before you begin. Once you have approval from both then email the approved article title along with the languages being translated from and to ewan.mcandrew@ed.ac.uk
6. The assignment must be in excess of 1500 words this semester (& by that we include only the main prose text - not the notes, references & bibliography etc. at the end of the article). Copy the main prose text from the source article onto a new Microsoft Word document. Add the Word count at the end of the article (e.g. Word count = 1554 words). Save the Word document as YOUR NAME - Source Article - Source Article Title and make sure you have recorded the word count at the bottom of this new document.
7. Go to the Content Translation tool in the Contributions menu.
8. Click Start a new translation.
9. Input the languages you are translating from and to.
10. Input the source article title.
11. Click Start translation.
12. The article will then be translated by you paragraph by paragraph. Check and double-check the paragraphs being translated that they make sense in the target language and that the formatting copies across correctly. Important: Save your work as you go by copying completed paragraphs into a second Word document entitled: 'YOUR NAME - New translated article - New article title'.
13. Consult the Content Translation Guide, FAQ and screencast to help you with any issues. Your article is to be peer reviewed by another student and peer reviews are to be emailed to ewan.mcandrew@ed.ac.uk by Friday 7th May 2021.
14. Aim to publish on the target language Wikipedia w/c Monday 10th May 2021 and no later than 5pm on Friday 14th May 2021 so that the project is finally concluded on Friday 14th May 2021. Once you are satisfied with your translation email ewan.mcandrew@ed.ac.uk to advise this and then click Publish translation to complete your translation. Make sure the newly published article has enough categories and links to other pages (and that other pages link to it). If your article was not over 1500 words (this word count has to be recorded at the bottom of your 2nd Word document for the new translated article you have just created) then you will need to repeat this process with a second article.
15. If your newly translated article(s) are now in excess of 1500 words, congratulations you have created your first page(s) and the assignment. Copy the text of the source article (with word count) to an MS Word document. Copy the text of the new translated article (with word count) to another MS Word document. Upload both to Learn by 5pm on Friday 23rd April 2021.

One final step

Finally, Wikipedia articles each have a sidebar listing its counterparts in other languages, so the last thing you should do is to make sure this includes links to and from the new translated material. A guide on this can be found at Help:Interlanguage links.

1. The word limit is 1500-2000 words but please make sure the chosen article is sufficiently challenging. The article in question will need to be run past both your portfolio tutor and myself to avoid issues where the original source articles do not have enough citations or references so consequently the target article did not either.
2. Please challenge yourself - work in a different language direction/pairing if possible this semester or with a different student or on a completely different topic from last time.
3. Make sure the topic you work on is of interest to you and maybe of interest/importance to readers of the target Wikipedia. Use these two weeks until the end of February to assess Wikipedia's current content and see where you would like to contribute and do the most good. I will finalise the last remaining articles from Semester One to make sure all work from last semester is published and peer reviewed by 1st March.
4. Consider the under-representation of topics related to postcolonial theory and the Black Lives Movement as topic areas to work on. Students on the University History Society have also worked on articles related to Scotland's links with slavery here. Email Dr. Hephzibah Israel if you are require suggestions or advice on this theme.
5. WikiProjects on English Wikipedia have Assessment tables which list the best quality articles related to their project area. e.g. Wikiproject Sociology, WikiProject Human Rights, WikiProject Black Lives Matter, WikiProject African diaspora
6. Please aim to select an article from the Featured Articles quality criteria (the highest quality standard on Wikipedia) or the Good Article quality criteria (the 2nd highest). There is a wider pool to choose from on English Wikipedia because it is the largest Wikipedia but you’ll notice that if you click on the Featured article link, there are links on the left hand side of pages to the ‘Featured Articles’ page in each of the other language Wikipedias. You will find the same if you click on the ‘Good Article’ links. There will be a lot less featured and good articles in other language Wikipedias but as long as the article has achieved good article status or featured article status, regardless of the language then it should be of the required standard to translate for our purposes. Therefore please take extra time to choose your source article(s) so that they are the right length, right level of linguistic challenge and have enough citations so that they will have no such problems in the target Wikipedia.
7. If neither of these high quality articles meets your interest then next try A class articles then B class articles then C class articles. The subject matter, structuring, and coherence of the article may be less good but it is the referencing that is the most important factor when considering these articles.
8. You can view Pages needing translation into English and do category searches for articles in a subject you are interested in e.g. Category:Articles needing translation from foreign-language Wikipedias. You can also view the Portal directory to search portals in the same way.
9. Tool: Gapfinder - This tool has been developed to help editors find missing content in any language for which there is a Wikipedia edition. GapFinder helps you discover articles that exist in one language but are missing in another. Start by selecting a source language and a target language. GapFinder will find trending articles in the source that are missing in the target. If you are interested in a particular topic area, provide a seed article in the source language, and GapFinder will find related articles missing in the target. Click on a card to take a closer look at a missing article to see if you would like to create it from scratch or translate it.
10. Tool: "Not in the other language" - This tool looks for Wikidata items that have a page in one language but not in the other (using Wikipedia categories to filter the results).
11. Check the word count of the source article. You can use this tool Search tool to look up the article & its word count but this includes references in its count so is not accurate enough for our purposes. Hence you should copy the article's main text (not including notes, references, bibliographies etc.) into a Word document so you can get a more accurate indication of the main body of the article's wordcount.

Articles to be settled on by no later than 5pm on Friday 26th February 2021.

• Guide explaining the Content Translation Tool.
• Content Translation FAQ
• List of all the different language Wikipedias
• Statistics about all the different Language Wikipedias
• Content Translation Stats
• Wikipedia:Translation - How to translate
• Video: "The Wikipedia Content Translation Tool reaches 100,000 translations" (short intro to Content Translation).
• Video - "The one true international language is translation" (Presentation at Wikimania 2016).
• Video: "Tech Talk: The MediaWiki Content Translation Extension" (Presentation from November 2014)
• Video: How-to video for doing medical translation with Wikipedia's Content Translation tool (using summary files).
• Video: How I can write or translate Wikipedia articles into Arabic
• Video: Content Translation in action (Wikimania 2015)
• Help page: Interlanguage links
• Discussion notes from Wikimania 2016 on the Content Translation tool
• Teaching translation with Wikipedia - the UCL example.
• Teaching Translation via Wikipedia - Education project at universities around the world.

Once you've learned the basics of editing using Wikipedia’s Visual Editor, I hope that you'll stay logged in and edit or create more articles. I've added some booklets and some links below that you may find useful. As a first step you may like to check out what What Wikipedia is not along with its 5 guiding principles: The 5 pillars.

• Please sign your messages on talk pages with four tildes (~~~~). This will automatically insert your " signature" (your username and a date stamp). The or button, on the tool bar above Wikipedia's text editing window, also does this.
• If you would like to play around with your new Wiki skills without changing the mainspace, the Sandbox is for you.

• Wikipedia is a tertiary resource, which relies upon secondary sources. Wikipedia is not a place for original research.
• For more guidance on the use of sources, see this guide here.
• Editors will also have access to some University of Edinburgh e-resources.
• Search for articles on Google Scholar
• Try the Wikipedia Library's list of free resources
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• The Hathi Trust Digital Library - 100s of novels & other assorted texts
• Shareable Images can be found through a Creative Commons search(which includes Google, Flickr & Wikicommons in its search).
• Images from Edinburgh University's collections - http://images.is.ed.ac.uk/

Suggested sources:

General

• DiscoverEd to find books, ebooks, journals, ejournals and more.

News sources

• Factiva
• British Newspaper Archive
• More at: Edinburgh University Library - Newspaper database

Theses databases

• Edinburgh Research Archive. For theses produced at the University of Edinburgh Edinburgh Research Archive
• Proquest Dissertations
• More at: Edinburgh University Library - Theses database

• 
  Wikipedia - Working with Images
• 
  Wikipedia - Writing about people
• 
  Wikipedia - Writing about Places
• 
  Wikipedia - Making Connections

• 
  Editing Wikipedia brochure (Wiki Education Foundation)
• 
  Illustrating Wikipedia brochure (Wiki Education Foundation)
• 
  Theories: Wikipedia and the production of knowledge
• 
  Evaluating Wikipedia brochure (Wiki Education Foundation)

Video guides to editing Wikipedia

Tutorials on Wikipedia editing

One page handouts

• 
  Using talk pages
• 
  Choosing an article
• 
  Citing your sources
• 
  Avoiding plagiarism
• 
  Classroom handout - moving out of your sandbox
• 
  Polishing your articles

Prior to the event:

1. RSVP: ewan.mcandrew@ed.ac.uk
2. Do you have a Wikipedia User Name?

   No? Create a Wikipedia account

   Yes? Go to Step #2

3. Sign up! Add your Wikipedia User Name to this section by clicking the blue button below (follow instructions). Your name will be added to the bottom of this page