It's true that shutting down such service which was based essentially on
work made by a large worldwide community is a bad sign. At least Twitter
should release all their current efforts in an open-sourced repository with
an open licence without commercial restrictions, possibly with attribution
(BSD-like, CC-BY) or with some basic share-alike or copyleft requirements
(ODbL, CC-BY-SA, GPL, LGPL), or left completely free (CC-0, Public domain,
WTFPL).
Shutting down the service compeltely and reasing the data would be an
insult to those that participated and from which Twitter benefited a lot.
We can understand that Twitter no logner wants to support it directly
itself and wants to save some costs, but there are certainly interesting
data to keep which could be reused in a possibly larger project as a
translation memory and corpus useful for many other free (of commercial)
translation engines. It's up to Twitter to choose their opensource
repository provider (such as GitHub), make the decessary licencing
requirements, and possibly open a competition to transfer the
administration of the project to some organized open groups (if the project
does not have to be left in readonly with no further development and can be
resurrected by independant groups creating their own branches or
integrating the data in their own corpus). For that, Twitter should ask
their community about the pros and cons of several candidate licences.
And may be Twitter will continue to be able to profit from the resurrected
or derivated projects (but it will jsut no longer be alone to use it).
2017-11-25 17:37 GMT+01:00 Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com>om>:
An inquiry from a friend, about a parallel translator
community.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Amy Johnson" <ajohnson(a)cyber.law.harvard.edu>
As of November 30, 2017, Twitter is shuttering its Translation Center.
Since 2011, the Translation Center has been a collaborative project, a
public endeavor that has brought together volunteer translators from around
the world. These translators have made Twitter accessible for millions of
others. With the closure of the Translation Center, the specifics of their
work -- the long debates, the compromises, the new challenges -- are about
to vanish.
Why should we care? There are a lot of reasons. Their work is magnificent
and deserves to be recorded in history, not quietly erased. Their work (and
similar) challenges major theories of translation, opening fresh
possibilities for better and different translation in the future.
(Translation studies scholars are enormously excited -- see, e.g. Miguel A.
Jiménez-Crespo's body of work on Facebook).
At the moment, a few -- very few -- pages from the Translation Center are
already archived in the Internet Archive. Unfortunately, there's so much
missing, from so many languages. I'm hoping that the translator community
might change that. unfortunately ever since Nov 1 they've only been
allowing public access to people who had already established accounts, so I
can't discuss this directly on the site.
Do any of you know of people who have worked with the Translation Center
who might be interested in such? Or have an alternative suggestion about
how I could access the site to propose this project?
Thanks in advance!
Best,
Amy
---
@shrapnelofme
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