Crowd-Source Translation Software For Free Content?

yahyamf writes "I have a lot of free educational content in the form of audio lectures and text, which I'd like to translate into as many languages as possible. I would also want to transcribe the audio and create audiobooks from the text. There are already several volunteers willing to contribute, but I need some web based software to manage all the work. Facebook is already doing something like this, but it is only for their content. I've also looked at Damned Lies, which is part of the Gnome project, but it doesn't seem to handle audio. Are there any other open source translation projects out there that I can customize and build upon?"

Comments

Question

[arizwebfoot]

Are they your lectures and who owns the copyright on the lectures? Does the university or do you? Since your work product was for hire . . .

Re:Question

[bcrowell]

Are they your lectures and who owns the copyright on the lectures? Does the university or do you? Since your work product was for hire . . .

Hold on there, cowboy. It's not that simple. In the US, work for hire status depends on three criteria, and those criteria are somewhat ambiguous as applied to university professors. Here is a more detailed discussion of the law. There isn't a clear legal precedent addressing the issue, but that's because the issue almost never comes up. The issue doesn't come up because there's a solid consensus in the world of education that the professor owns the copyright to things like lectures, textbooks, and journal articles. (Note that when it comes to articles, a journal that requires a copyright transfer asks the author, not the school, to sign it.) Regardless of the law, it's clear that there are overwhelmingly strong reasons (e.g., academic freedom) why universities know they shouldn't cross this line. It's sort of like Mia Farrow's famous remark that "you don't fuck the kids." Doesn't matter if it's theoretically legal to go there, you just don't go there.

More relevant questions to ask the OP would be (1) where we can take a look at these materials, and (2) whether he's put them under a free license such as CC-BY-SA. If the answer to #2 is no, then probably nobody will be interested in doing the translations for free.

In answer to the OP's original question, I know of two approaches that could be used. One would be to create a wiki of the English version and then allow translators to use the wiki to produce translations. Another would be to put the English version in some kind of format that's amenable to version control (e.g., plain text or latex), and use version control software such as git.

I have some experience with this because I wrote some CC-BY-SA-licensed physics textbooks, and over the years I've been contacted by roughly 10 people who were enthusiastic about translating them. None of those people ever translated any significant amount of text. It's a huge amount of work to do this kind of translation, and people's enthusiasm seems to evaporate quickly. A good example of the fragility of enthusiasm, in a slightly different context, is wikibooks, which is basically an abysmal failure, at least if you compare what it's accomplished over all the years of existence with its original stated goals, which were to revolutionize education. Writing or translating a book is just too much work for most people to tackle without some kind of financial or nonfinancial reward. It's not analogous to software, which is a functional product rather than a creative one.

Oh no

[Dyinobal]

I've fallen behind in my web 2.0 buzz words. What the hell's a crowd source? I was thinking someone or something that draws crowds like Obama or double jointed Swedish twins. Unenlightened minds want to know!

Re:Oh no

[EdZ]

It means "post your work on the internet and get lots of other people do do it".

Re:Oh no

[MBCook]

A crowd source is where crowds come from, like an apartment building.

A crowd sink is where the crowds go to, like a stadium event.

Standard EE terminology. So the poster must be looking for... a place to steal people from to force them to translate boring lectures? I'm not sure how electrical engineering applies here.

Maybe electroshocks as "encouragement" to do the work?

Re:Open source audio translation?

[Jurily]

You're looking for open source software that can combine both those into something effective? If you don't mind the translated audio being practically useless, then you might be able to find something.

My hovercraft is full of eels.

Re:Open source audio translation?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm pretty sure that the writer of TFQ is looking for software to coordinate a human speech to text effort(ie, manage volunteer accounts, serve audio clips for transcription/translation, receive results files from them, and so forth), not speech to text software.

He is, in essence, looking for an audio equivalent of the interface used by the Distributed Proofreaders project. With, perhaps, a side of translation mechanisms similar to the ones used on Ubuntu launchpad or equivalent. Neither are particular exotic technologically.

Such a setup is more or less prosaic in CS terms, no major breakthroughs need to be made; but it would constitute a somewhat specialized flavor of Content Management system. I honestly don't know if anything of the sort exists.

Re:durrr...my head herts..

[Kamokazi]

That's actualy a great idea. Just include this link with a copy of the English language versions:

http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=learn+to+speak+english

Problem solved!

A Helpful Comment

[WyerByter]

The people over at BOINC have a software called Bossa for distributed thinking projects (crowd sourcing). I am not sure of the current status of the project, but I have heard of at least one group that is trying to implement it.