Wikipedia as a Translation Zone: A heterotopic analysis of the online encyclopedia and its collaborative volunteer translator community

Recent research has highlighted the emergence and proliferation of online communities of volunteer translators whose intensely collaborative activities are largely facilitated by the participatory and interactive nature of new networked communication technologies. Much of the discussion regarding these forms of web-based translation has tended to focus on what brings individuals together to give up their time, skills and effort when co-operating within such prosumer-led projects. By contrast, this paper presents a case study focused on the construction of the English Wikipedia article about Tokyo in order to argue that it is important for translation scholars to additionally take into account the difficult processes of fierce conflict and debate which often characterise interactions within such communities. It does so by means of the spatial mode of analysis encouraged by Foucault’s writings on ‘heterotopia’, demonstrating how this conceptual method can be applied to explain and explore the multifaceted negotiations that occur in this environment

When to cross Over? Cross-language linking using Wikipedia for VideoCLEF 2009

We describe Dublin City University (DCU)'s participation in the VideoCLEF 2009 Linking Task. Two approaches were implemented using the Lemur information retrieval toolkit. Both approaches rst extracted a search query from the transcriptions of the Dutch TV broadcasts. One method rst performed search on a Dutch Wikipedia archive, then followed links to corresponding pages in the English Wikipedia. The other method rst translated the extracted query using machine translation and then searched the English Wikipedia collection directly. We found that using the original Dutch transcription query for searching the Dutch Wikipedia yielded better results

Information Access in a Multilingual World: Transitioning from Research to Real-World Applications

Multilingual Information Access (MLIA) is at a turning point wherein substantial real-world applications are being introduced after fifteen years of research into cross-language information retrieval, question answering, statistical machine translation and named entity recognition. Previous workshops on this topic have focused on research and small- scale applications. The focus of this workshop was on technology transfer from research to applications and on what future research needs to be done which facilitates MLIA in an increasingly connected multilingual world

Towards Better Understanding Researcher Strategies in Cross-Lingual Event Analytics

With an increasing amount of information on globally important events, there is a growing demand for efficient analytics of multilingual event-centric information. Such analytics is particularly challenging due to the large amount of content, the event dynamics and the language barrier. Although memory institutions increasingly collect event-centric Web content in different languages, very little is known about the strategies of researchers who conduct analytics of such content. In this paper we present researchers' strategies for the content, method and feature selection in the context of cross-lingual event-centric analytics observed in two case studies on multilingual Wikipedia. We discuss the influence factors for these strategies, the findings enabled by the adopted methods along with the current limitations and provide recommendations for services supporting researchers in cross-lingual event-centric analytics.Comment: In Proceedings of the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries 201