Abstract:

The past decade has seen the emergence of several projects involving the translation of Wikipedia articles as part of translator training (Konieczny, 2012; Szymczak, 2013; Martínez-Carrasco, 2017, 2018). At the Universitat Jaume I in Castellón, Spain, third-year undergraduate students translate Wikipedia articles from their native Spanish into English as part of the WIKITRAD/WIKITRANS project which has been underway for several years.

These Wikipedia translation projects provide students with the opportunity to develop a number of key skills for their future profession and, simultaneously, to contribute to a project with a tangible impact on society, thereby giving them a sense of real-world achievement.

This paper, however, focuses on the next stage. i.e. what can be learnt from the subsequent treatment of these translations by the Wikipedia community. Continuous correction and improvement are an intrinsic part of the open collaboration principle (Levine & Prietula, 2014) that Wikipedia is based on, and the linguistic and stylistic amendments made to these translations by contributors from all over the world can serve as a valuable source of feedback for students. Furthermore, an analysis of these amendments can also provide valuable insights for translation teachers, as it enables them to identify the linguistic errors and imperfections that are most likely to be considered unacceptable by members of the public. The fact that Wikipedia provides a complete history of changes to every one of its articles allows us to conduct a fine-grained assessment of the process of collaborative linguistic revision (cf. McDonough Dolmaya, 2014).

The theoretical discussion of the positive impact of this type of feedback on learning and teaching will be supported by authentic examples of articles translated by students, which will illustrate the advantages of this innovative educational method.

References:
[1] Konieczny, Piotr. 2012. “Wikis and Wikipedia as teaching tool: Five years later”, First Monday 17 (9).
Levine, Sheen S. & Michael J. Prietula. 2014. “Open collaboration for innovation: Principles and performance”, Organization Science 25(5): 1414–1433.
[2] Martínez-Carrasco, Robert. 2017. “Wikipedia como plataforma digital de movilización de competencias: una experiencia didáctica”, in Jornada Nacional sobre Estudios Universitarios. Competencias: formación y evaluación, pp. 517–527. Castellón de la Plana: Universitat Jaume I U.P.
[3] Martínez-Carrasco, Robert. 2018. “Using Wikipedia as a classroom tool – a translation experience” in Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Higher Education Advances, HEAd’18, pp. 909–916. Universitat Politècnica de València.
[4] McDonough Dolmaya, Julie. 2014. “Revision history: Translation trends in Wikipedia”, Translation Studies 8 (1): 16-34.
Szymczak, Piotr. 2013. “Translating Wikipedia Articles: A Preliminary Report on Authentic Translation Projects in Formal Translator Training”, Acta Philologica 44, pp. 61-70.

Keywords:

Translation, open collaboration, crowd sourcing, innovative teaching methods.