ICANN participation

ICANN has created an internal translation co-ordination committee with members from across the organisation.
The aims and goals of the team are given below. Under that, the ongoing work to each goal is outlined:

• Identify and hire the expert and prepare the groundwork for his/her review
• Discover what the level of demand is for different translations
• Review the different needs and requirements for translation across departments
• Work out the implications of a broad, systemic translation policy
• Talk to others outside the organisation, both within the Internet community and those in the wider world, in order to build up awareness throughout ICANN and its community of translation issues

In terms of pragmatic work, the committee will also:

• Implement machine translation, wiki-style editing and community rating
• Produce an effective system for registering community interest in particular translations
• Produce a multi-lingual glossary

• ICANN has hired a translations expert who has interviewed a large number of people about the community's needs and also appeared at a special public meeting on translation at ICANN's Los Angeles meeting in November.
• A draft translation policy should be available for community review prior to the Delhi meeting in February
• A translations wiki to which all self-selecting community members have been invited has been set up and is working as an experiment to see what we can do with community translation
• The Translations Committee has reformed the internal system for translations, including clarifying the budget process so ICANN will be able able to get a clear sense of what the organisation is doing with translations.
• Interpretation at the Los Angeles meeting was extended to include five languages: Chinese, English, French, Spanish and Russian for one day in the main room. This was deemed a success and will be carried forward to other meetings in future.

Identify and hire a translations expert

Preparatory materials for drawing up a full job description have been compiled. A draft of the job description should be ready the week of 13-17 August.
Staff have spoken to two international translations experts and are chasing up leads. ICANN's head of human resources had been consulted about the job.
The intention is to hire an expert consultant as soon as possible, but the skills needed are highly specialised and that may make a fast hire difficult.

Discover what the level of demand is for different translations

A new registration system for ICANN meetings will ask people to specify their preferred language. That system should be work by the end of August.
More work need to be done to ascertain the level of demand for translation.

Review the different needs and requirements for translation across departments

Each member of the team is preparing a document outlining their department's translation needs and expectations.
These documents will be discussed during the regular weekly meeting of the translation team and compiled in late August in order to get an idea of the organisational requirements.

Work out the implications of a broad, systemic translation policy

Work has yet to being on this. It is important that the organisational requirements are reviewed first - see above.

A single webpage outling what is currently being translated and which stage that translation is in will be produced in the week 13-17 August.

Talk to others outside the organisation in order to build up awareness of translation issues

The team has already started informing current translators of the team's efforts. Webpages on the ICANN public participation site should provide a point of reference for those interested.
The team is compiling a list of people and organisations that have expressed an interest in translations issues wrt ICANN and will email them before the end of August in order to build the vital feedback mechanism that will be needed.

PRAGMATIC WORK

Implement machine translation, wiki-style editing and community rating

Final agreement on a licence for the SysTran automated translation software (used by the EU and Google) should be reached by the end of the week ending 17 August.
The software will be used in conjunction with the Drupal content management system software that ICANN is slowly moving its website over to. Initial experiments are planned with a new ALAC website and with announcements made by ICANN.
Research is due to start soon on a rating system to fit with Drupal. There are significant technical challenges associated with taking automatically translated text and turning it into text that acts as a self-editing wiki. As soon as the software licence is agreed, work will begin.

Produce an effective system for registering community interest in particular translations

Work to begin on this as soon as the translation software is in place. A greatly improved stats engine on the main ICANN site will be customised to review how popular translated pages are.
As soon as the team is happy with a basic translation roll-out, ICANN will make a series of announcements aimed at promoting the translation efforts with a request for feedback.

Produce a multi-lingual glossary

Work has already begun on the glossary. We are building it using Google's online spreadsheet function. You can view it in full here (will require you signing up to Google). If you want to help build up the glossary and be a part of the team, please post a comment here or email the team at trans-comm@icann.org. We have decided making the document fully open will create more problems than it solves, but those in the community that want to help, please do get in contact. We need your help with this.