Abstract:

In the new environment for global communication, translation has opened up to new trends such as "openness”, “sharing” and “collaboration” generating participation from a whole virtual community that also includes non-professional translators, volunteer ⁄ fan translators or people acting as translators (people seeking to spread their message across different languages), therefore all types of social actors. Different concepts have been developed to describe the collaborative nature of work and learning: learning organization, learning community, innovative knowledge communities, learning within the network (learning based on common goals and trust or the concept of "ba", originally proposed by the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro and adapted by Nonaka and Konno (1998) to define a shared space (physical, virtual or mental), which promotes the creation of knowledge, of meaning and of relationships. A series of new concepts also emerged in the translation sphere. “Community translation” (or social translation) refers to translation performed, usually on a volunteer basis, by members of a group or by people with common interests.” (DePalma & Kelly 2008: 6). Translators may participate in content creation to make information available to broader audiences in their own language, to improve their language skills, for personal satisfaction or for charity or voluntary organizations. Translators may also appeal to community translation in order to promote their services or receive free subscriptions in return for their work. Content creators may also offer direct payment to translators in order to increase translation quality and improve response times. The name of “collaborative translation” is used to describe the work of professional translators concurrently working on the same translation project and simultaneously using the same advanced translation tools. As for “crowdsourced translation”, it “opens a translation project to teams comprised of any mix of volunteer translators, employees, contractors, or language service providers (LSPs). It leverages the power of the swarm to accomplish much more than a single translator or even an LSP alone could do” (idem). Finally, the new wave, “cloud translation”, imagines translation as being performed by lots of people working together in the cloud of some 7000 languages with an estimated 2 billion users, rising to 2.5 billion by 2014. These people access technology from a web browser and do not need to worry about managing the translation infrastructure and resources, even if one of their major concerns is the security of the data stored in the cloud.
The e-training solution LinguisTech (www.linguistech.ca) developed by the Language Technologies Research Centre in Gatineau (Canada) is an all-in-one technological tool, integrating various translation environments. The goal of this unique project is to increase the use of technologies, to improve the efficiency of the Canadian translation industry and to study these changes and their impact on the profession. Our presentation will focus on one unique project which is part of LinguisTech, namely the distant learning environment The Translation Ecosystem.

Keywords:

Translation technologies, collaborative learning, didactic innovation, translation ecosystem.