The Translation Project: Overview of Stage One

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The Translation ProjectOverview of Stage One
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The basics

• Who? Dave, Joanna, Lorene, and 40 volunteers
• What languages? Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Dutch,
  French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian,
  Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese,
  Russian, Ukrainian
• When? From our first orientation meeting on
  November 7 to now

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Our initial goals

• To have the Invitation and surrounding documents
  translated into the 15 target languages by the
  launch date
• To learn about the process of managing a
  translation project, and test out a model for
  working with volunteer translators

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Our approach

• Work with volunteers in NYC, but with the
  possibility of collaborating online with
  volunteers in other locations
• Bring people together to form teams based on
  language
• Give teams autonomy as well as guidelines
• Encourage face-to-face meetings as well as online
  communication

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Stage one documents

• A list of common terms
• An Invitation for Practical Dreamers (done by
  translation company)
• The FAQ on invite.idealist.org
• A brief About Us page

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Outreach and orientation

• Posted volunteer opportunities and events on
  Idealist (duh)
• Called, emailed, and posted flyers
• University clubs and departments
• Cultural institutions
• Immigrant organizations
• Consulates
• Neighborhood organizations
• 31 people attended our 4 orientation meetings a
  few more met with us individually

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How it all worked

• Only 2 teams stuck to the deadlines
• Teams set up their own face-to-face meetings, and
  used Yahoo Groups, Skype, email, and phone
• New volunteers were incorporated into existing
  teams
• Some volunteers outside of NYC contributed
• We sent out update emails to all the volunteers
  every 2 or 3 weeks
• Dave and Joanna cut and pasted the translations
  into HTML

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How cool is this?

• ???? ?????? ??????? ????
• ??????????
• Een uitnodiging voor praktische dromers
• Invitation aux rêveurs qui veulent agir !
• Ein Aufruf an pragmatische Träumer
• ????? ??????? ??????
• Undangan untuk para idealis praktis
• ????????????
• ?? ?? ?????? ???.
• Zaproszenie dla praktycznych marzycieli
• ?????????? ??????????-?????????

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Where we are now

• 3 teams have finished all stage one documents
• 6 teams are still working
• 1 team has just been formed
• 2 teams have not shown much activity recently
• 4 languages never formed active teams
• Weve met with 1 team for a follow-up meeting,
  and 6 more are being scheduled for after the
  retreat

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What we learned

• More face-to-face interaction (among team members
  and with AWB) correlates to greater team success
• Professionally translated documents were poor
  quality
• Some teams like deadlines some do not
• We really can trust volunteers with translation!

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The volunteers say

• I liked the intentions and the general ideas
  behind Action Without Borders, and therefore, I
  found it fun to help realize it. I liked that it
  had an international character, because hanging
  out with folks from different cultures and
  backgrounds is one of my favorite, favorite
  things to do in life.
• I believe that Idealist.org should definitely be
  launched internationally so that people who speak
  languages other than English, Spanish or French
  could benefit from this gigantic database
  service.

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The volunteers say

• The fact to be able to work together, hear
  different ideas and agree upon something is a
  good feeling. Also, I am happy to know I am doing
  something that will benefit a lot of people.
• It was an overall fun process, I laughed a lot!
• We put a lot of time and effort on it and are
  very proud of the result. We wanted to be clear
  and consistent we believe we are. The readers
  should be able to get the message they were
  supposed to get.

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Recommendations

• Volunteers should meet (other team members and
  us) face to face, if possible
• Schedule drop-in translation days or hours at the
  NY office for all volunteers
• Offer deadlines if they will be helpful
• More to come!