Wikiversity:Interlingual Beta Club

The Interlingual Beta Club is looking for a few good translators and a whole mess of wanna-be translators with open minds and a desire to learn the craft. Our reason for forming is based on a couple of facts: a) Wikiversity needs more translators. b) Wikiversity can train more translators.

About IBC

The Interlingual Beta Club has nothing to do with earning Bs in six languages (Wikiversity doesn't give grades anyway). It has to do with producing and improving Beta versions of Wikiversity and translations. The club is a vehicle for promoting a multi-faceted, interlingual Wikiversity:Practicum for learning the vocation of language translation – a marketable commodity in the outside world and a much-needed function within Wikiversity proper.

The Translator's Handbook

The practicum is designed to propagate itself by way of a body of text:

The Translator's Handbook:An Interlingual Training Manual

This text, though starting (here) at the English Wikiversity will not stay here long. It's passage to de:Wikiversity and es:Wikiversity will take place immediately – even in its initial rough draft form. Like all Wikimedia Projects, it shall remain a work-in-progress for years to come. It can be thought of as a living document.

IBC's Roles

The Interlingual Beta Club is:

a custodial group for the Translator's Handbook
an association of Wikiversity participants with a passion for Interlingual collaboration and dialog
a learning group dedicated to Wikiversity translations
a teaching staff dedicated to Training new translators
an academic organization that promotes Multilingualism throughout the Wikiversity community

The IBC may take on other roles as well.

Academic Organization

The Interlingual Beta Club has by design a grassroots organization form characterized as a club. A campaign that begins at The Wikiversity Center for Foreign Language Learning at en.wikiversity.org grows quickly into a more formal academic entity that goes by the name Translation Department.

Translation departments

Adopting Foreign Language Learning's organizational parentage, a complex academic Practicum was drafted upward into the Practical Arts and Sciences. These are forming organically as specialized but interconnected Translation Departments within several schools:

The School of Language and Literature (Humanities) via a focus on Foreign Language Learning
The School of Linguistics (Social Sciences) via a classification schema built around Languages and Language families
The School of Computer Science (Engineering and Technology) via a collaborative association with another practicum from The Institute for Applied Computer Science is organizing learning groups and developing resources:
1. Computational linguistics/computer-assisted translation (Human-machine interfacing)
2. Computational linguistics/machine translation (lexicons, glossaries, corpora, automated tasks, etc.)
3. Learning Objects (Learning object metadata processing, object modeling, data warehousing, etc)
4. Other ACS Topics...
School:Media Studies (Portal:Media) via a collaborative association with yet another practicum developed for The Media Project Institute centered upon (but not limited to) Wikiversity the Movie and its Mulitilingual aspects. Innovative spin-offs are expected.

Code of conduct

The Wikiversity:Interlingual Beta Club is tasked with instituting a culture of intense collaboration (characteristic of any experimental project - the nature of a beta) while traversing extremes of interest and practice. Participant groups are expected to develop the ability to produce faithful translations of gargantuan bodies of both text and speech.

Our motto: Participation is everything is not so much about the quantitative aspects (popular culture, the hive mind, herd behavior, etc.) typical of wiki groups, but of the qualitative aspects (academic standards, ethics, worthwhile content, etc.). The personal choice to participate is the focal point of the WV:IBC. For example monolingual English-speaking members are encouraged to venture out of their "comfort zone" to join es:Wikiversity, de:Wikiversity and French Wikiversity. Our mission is to create comfort, eliminate confusion, resolve inconsistencies and dispel doubt. Our purpose is to innovate.

Consciousness Raising

A shortage of qualified translators seems to always exist. Much of the IBC's social definition and identity will come from its efforts to attract attention to translation projects, recruit translators and trainees, manage projects and collaborations, provide liaisons between versions, schools, departments and learning groups (socially and academically), and other adventures in experiential learning – Beta-learning.

IBC Motto:Participation is everything.

Essay Contest

Category:Essays is a new category for main namespace articles used for inspiration and enlightenment.

The Wikiversity:Interlingual Beta Club is kicking off with an Wikiversity:Essay Contest to promote the Multilingualism Practicum. This contest is synchronously conducted on all of the Wikiversity_translations and Betas.

The object of the campaign is to ask the question: Why is language translation important? The name: Translator's Handbook gives the impression of a lone translator at work parsing a body of text. The idea is to steer the reader (again singular) toward a personal context.

You'll notice that the introduction to the book is a placeholder for the contest winner's essay. The goal is to draw out of the Wikiversity community collective and individual ideas that can be embedded at not only the forefront of the book, but into the character of Wikiversity itself.

Certification

The IBC will develop an ongoing symbolic awards program along the lines of Wikipedia's Barnstars. Although Wikiversity is not in the business of conveying degrees upon even the most accomplished learners, the intense effort and focus required to faithfully translate a text must be acknowledged. Likewise, efforts to effectively teach the art of translation should also be brought to the community's attention. It stands to reason that the real-world demand for translators will eventually discover a growing pool of qualified personnel who have honed their skills at Wikiversity.

Literacy

Because the Translation departments are tied intrinsically to the broad scope of the School:Language and Literature, the prospects for Wikiversity translations could have an impact upon global literacy. It doesn't take a Leap of Faith to believe that the so-called "smaller" languages can benefit from thoughtful and accurate translations of texts that the major language world takes for granted.

Furthermore, new arrivals to Wikiversity may discover the effects of spin-offs such as lexicons, glossaries, advanced linguistics tools, multimedia objects and innovative approaches to problem-solving. By a slight stretch of the imaginination, one may even grow to believe that an increase in interlingual dialog can help bring about international understanding and World Peace.

We'll pause there.

Resources

Directory:

Participants

Membership is absolutely open: