Making endangered languages fun ....

In the Neapolitan discussion group napulitano@yahoogroups.com we are discussing about languages ... how to protect them ... how to make them fun ... how to make sure they will survive ...

It is not an easy task, but only caring about a Wikipedia and a dictionary (in Wiktionary or WiktionaryZ) is not enough. Like Berto said: we need cool stuff, things that attract young people ... it must be fun and cool again to speak and write another language, the mother tongue maybe or that one of friends.

Let's take the example of Neapolitan. Now you will say: well, but it is not in the red book of endangered languages ... not now ... if we stand here and wait it will be part of it very soon. Oh yes, great ... there are all these famous songs, poems, films ... well: they are confined in their angle ... we need Neapolitan in everyday life.

I was answering to Berto's "we need something fun for young people to start off with" ... when a link came along my way, by chance, through Gerard - the link to the website of a Wikipedian ... and there I found something really interesting: a link to a comic they are creating: http://www.nutkidz.net/ - well, it is a comic ... have a look at the archive ... fun stuff ... well yes, we should translate it into Neapolitan ... and I already have the answer: we may translate it into any language.

That leads me to what we need in Neapolitan (and of couse the same is valid for all other languages as well)

• people need to understand that what they speak is a language - that it has a high cultural value and that it should be treated like English, French, Italian, Spanish etc. - they should be very proud of it
  
• we need the language to be used in everyday life - not only with friends
• we need localised software
  
• we need localised websites
  
• we need localised games
• we need cartoons, new stories, news
• we need our wikipedia :-)
• we need a freely accessible dictionary with downloadable data
• we need spell checkers
• we need to get old documents out to the public - even only scanned without OCR

Well, there is one more thing we need: people who share our goals ... we really do need them. Please get into touch with us - on wikipedia, by e-mail, in chat, on skype ... we will try to connect you to the people who care about your language.

Besides caring about language only: old traditions need to be kept alive ... just thinking about the Neapolitan cribs in Maiori ... how to make Mozzarella (handmade) ... we should write down stories old people tell us ... but how much can a handful of people do?

Now you might say: well, I would like to do something, but even if I am of Neapolitan origin I don't speak the language ... no probs ... if you want to help: there are many, many things to do ... first of all: look in the old stuff you have at home, ask your grandparents, try to find texts, photos ... all is important ... it is like a giant jigsaw puzzle ... each piece needs to find its place.

Well, I could go ahead ... there's so much to do and to write about and for sure I will come back to this theme over and over again.

Languages ... languages ... languages ... and contents

Working on WiktionaryZ brings up many, many questions. Today, considering rare and minority languages we encountered a problem: these languages don't have a place on where to publish articles, contents (like in Wikisource), create encyclopaedic contents like in Wikipedia ... definitely we don't have a place for that right now.

One possibility, considering that Multilingual MediaWiki is being programmed, could be to create one wiki per project where languages that don't have enough contributing members can create contents in their language. This would mean we have "one general wiki" for minority and rare langauges where people can create their contents. It could also become the basis for a "new language creation policy" - this means: people can create and edit there, grow their user base, and when certain criteria are met they can pass over to their own project ... but: does this really make sense? I mean: having an own wikipedia means that administration work becomes much more than just editing on a Multilingual MediaWiki ... there people can concentrate on creating contents instead of having to loose time to create and re-create substructures. The same is valid for Wikisource and Wikinews ... hmmm ... I know that this is one of those controversial arguments ... one of those where people fight and talk and talk and talk for hours ...

Fact is: we need a place where new languages (and in these times we are mainly talking about rare and minority languages or languages of regions where people don't have easy Internet access) can easily be started, a place where not too many requirements must be met to start off ... a place that welcomes even one new article a month or one edit a week.

Will we be able, open enough and tolerant enough to have such a place? I really hope so.

There is one strange thing: I planned this article, knew what I wanted to write, but while writing my thoughts went a different way and I just wrote what came into mind ... and this is the result.

Healthcare and communication problems ... solved?!?!

Well ... they could be solved up to quite a good level. We are already had contact with people from Mediphrase. Since WiktionaryZ was then still read-only and we could not show the potentials we did not take further steps. Now, just some minutes ago, I found an article on timesdispatch.com that talked about a similar project done in Virginia. We already knew that people working in health care often incur in the same problem: they need to deal with people who don't understand their language. So the translation of phrases like:

- I need to draw a blood specimen.
- You are going to feel a needle stick.
etc.

Indeed are very useful. What we would very much like to see is the co-operation of all interested parties and we would be happy to host the related terminology and phrases on WiktionaryZ where people can add further translations, create relations, where the download in TBX format will allow for offline use. This will result in advantage for all involved parties and patients will be able to communicate more effectively with health workers and doctors.

I would very much like to see the interested parties partnering ... it would make so much sense - also because: bad communication in some cases might kill ...

Evangelism ...

Being Evangelist for Wiktionaryz ... not always an easy task ... and quite a lot of responsibility ...

The other day I received a mail - I'm not going to tell you by who, being it a private mail - telling me to "Use the title with great pride!" This came a from a person I higly esteem and I herewith would like to say: Thank you! I needed it in just that moment.

When it comes to evangelism most of what I learnt comes from one single person: Guy Kawasaki. Very often I am not sure if I am doing the right thing - of course many steps are planned - many others instead are just the result of what I feel that needs to be done.

If you have your dream and hesitate to make it become true, the only advice I can give you is: live your dream and chances are high that it will become true. I would also very much like to suggest you to read some of Guy's books (a list is also present on Wikipedia) and his blog. My personal favourites are Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive your Competition Crazy and the latest one The Art of the Start, which truly helps a lot considering that WiktionaryZ actually is a non-profit project under an open license.

Strange postings these days, right? Not much about language industry, WiktionaryZ, OmegaT etc. ... well, yes, I still feel strange (see the WiktionaryZ effect ;-).

Is there something wrong with mom? Or: the WiktionaryZ effect ;-)

Imagine two four-year-old kids looking at their mom thingking "there must be something veeeeery wrong ... did she get mad...?" - well no, I did not get mad, but my first reaction when the e-mail of Erik arrived was quite .... ehm .... loud. WiktionaryZ has taken exactly 19 months from the first talks between Gerard and me and a pre-alpha editabilty. Now you say: well, it's fine that it is editable, but it is only pre-alpha ... and so: what is so extraordinary of that dictionary? Hmmm ... I am feeling as if the world from one second to the other has changed. I made my first edit yesterday on April 30, 2006 at 17:16 UTC. From then on a meccanism started that is still not over - I was not even able to write all my contacts that it is definitely there ... only the English-speaking contacts were informed ... of course: first of all we had to try out if things work smootly and they almost do. Then answering e-mails coming in started ... I just could not say: no, they have to wait. Discussions through IRC and chat ... it was great ... and my kids there ... looking at me a bit worried about all that hyperactivity ... but then again: Carlie and Lola, a cartoon for kids, became more interesting and I suppose they just thought "well, she'll calm down sooner or later" :-)

From this morning adding Neapolitan was possible and of course I immediately started to try that out adding simple words like water and child.

Over 20 years have gone by since I had my first thought about "wouldn't it be great to have one dictionary where all the words you need can be found" - that was at language school when dealing with English, French and Spanish .... then there were no computers (at least no PCs like we know them today) - then, three years after that I started my computer specialisation with the newest personal computer on the market at that time - an IBM with Intel processor 8088 working with DOS 2.11 as OS ... and shortly afterwards the 8086 came out ... then I bought my first computer an Amstrad 1512 - with colour monitor (16!!!!! colours), a 10 MB hard disk, a 5 1/4'' floppy disk drive .... and I remember games like BigTop and Digger .... the games we played during break time. My parrot that once fairly angry due to the lack of attention had came over to sit on the keyboard and made me crash the computer (where I was finishing a home-work and than had to re-start over). I remember when I programmed my first apps with dBase III+ .... one of them was the first trial to get lists of words in there ...

And today ... there is that software called Mediawiki and you can work together on one project with people anywhere in the world - the only thing you need is a computer and an internet connection. You can talk in chat, via skype .... and the world became so small ...

Times are changing ... the world is changing ... how will WiktionaryZ change the world? (if so ...)

First editability is there!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Today on 17:16 the first article on WiktionaryZ was edited!!!!!

Translating contents for small Wikipedias

Well, often it makes a lot of sense to translate articles for small Wikipedias. There are various reasons - one of them for me is: fast contents creation in order to allow other people to go on working on what I put there. Now, when it comes to whole articles people still often ulse the slowest method: open a Wikipedia page and copy the contents pasting it to another Wikipedia page where they then translate it step by step. A faster approach, using a good glossary, is the work with a CAT-Tool like OmegaT, but you still have to open the wiki page, copy the text, paste it in the text editor - or in OpenOffice.org, save it, translate it with the CAT-Tool and then open the .odp file and copy and past the text to its destination page. Now this copy and paste takes some time and if you do it frequently you will note how fast you reach an hour that you loose in only copying and pasting ... time ago there was that proposal of a wiki-read - translate - wiki write feature for OmegaT. It would be great to have it - simply to save so much time and to be able to do much more for the wikipedia instead of handling copy/paste mechanisms.

Then there is that part I mainly do on the Neapolitan wikipedia I mainly translate calendar pages there - or better actually only the "born" people. I did this for approx. 15 pages up to now and today I noted that 80% of the work is already done, because most people listed are those we all know: writers, composers, politicians etc. OmegaT is particularly valuable with this thanks to its extraordinary flexible segmentation rules - they allow me to strip out only the part to be translated since the name of the person remains - only the profession or what that person was known for needs translation. The segmentation rules are based on regular expressions and compared to my first calendar page they make me save 80% of the translation time :-)

This is simply something we need.

A further advantage: it could happen that on certain wikipedias people simply decide to update certain articles always according to their original source ... for certain stuff that would make sense (example: science) - this means that if an article is updated and you want to update the translated one you just have it run against the old Translation Memory you built and all that remained the same will show up and does not need to be translated anymore.

A further advantage is terminology consistency and style consistency when several people work on similar or related articles. They can exchange translation memory and search for terminology in there (besides exchanging their glossaries that one day anyway will come from WiktionaryZ). This means better quality and faster translation because over time more and more terminology will be in the Translation Memories and glossaries and so people don't need to search in further ressources.

All in all having that wiki-read - translate - wiki-write feature would be a huge advantage. I would simply love it.