Wednesday, August 25, 2004
Andrea |
Free Culture Chinese Translation Project: Some Lessons Learned
What makes the Free Culture Chinese Translation Project unique is its organizational approach. Here are a few lessons that the team learned when they recently began to reflect on their experiences in the translation project.
Leveraging on Social Network
Unlike other projects such as Wikipedia where anyone can contribute, the project harnessed the social capital within a group of individual social networks. As this is a by-invitation only project and only trustworthy members can contribute, it mobilized the right kind of human resources in a very short span of time. In this case, it took about two days to put together a team of people capable of translating from English into Chinese. It also help mitigated the risks of verbal abuses that are common in many Chinese websites. Overall, project participants are more polite, trustful and constructive in their exchanges given the social trust that existed since the day one of the project.
However, such approach is not free of weaknesses - at least within the Chinese context. As some members joined the project out of politeness and social obligations, not all members were active. Roughly twenty percent of the people involved did eighty percent of the work.
The Fun Element
A visual map and a members' photo area in the project team webpage help facilitated better understanding and trust among project members while adding fun to the overall project experience. Members could show their location and see each other's geographical location in a visual map embedded in the project site. This helps to build trust and coordinate time differences across the team. They may also use different font types and colors to make their work experience more fun.
Decentralized Structure and Free Culture
Under a decentralized structure, members were free to take up and initiate any new tasks, resulting in new initiatives that were beyond the project goals originally envisioned. Members took the initiatives to liaise with Chinese publishing house that have resulted in a printed edition of the book, hence increasing awareness of the philosophy behind Free Culture beyond the blog community and into the general public.
(My many special thanks to Tian, Chenwei, Isaac and Yining for their thoughtful input into this post.)
Leveraging on Social Network
Unlike other projects such as Wikipedia where anyone can contribute, the project harnessed the social capital within a group of individual social networks. As this is a by-invitation only project and only trustworthy members can contribute, it mobilized the right kind of human resources in a very short span of time. In this case, it took about two days to put together a team of people capable of translating from English into Chinese. It also help mitigated the risks of verbal abuses that are common in many Chinese websites. Overall, project participants are more polite, trustful and constructive in their exchanges given the social trust that existed since the day one of the project.
However, such approach is not free of weaknesses - at least within the Chinese context. As some members joined the project out of politeness and social obligations, not all members were active. Roughly twenty percent of the people involved did eighty percent of the work.
The Fun Element
A visual map and a members' photo area in the project team webpage help facilitated better understanding and trust among project members while adding fun to the overall project experience. Members could show their location and see each other's geographical location in a visual map embedded in the project site. This helps to build trust and coordinate time differences across the team. They may also use different font types and colors to make their work experience more fun.
Decentralized Structure and Free Culture
Under a decentralized structure, members were free to take up and initiate any new tasks, resulting in new initiatives that were beyond the project goals originally envisioned. Members took the initiatives to liaise with Chinese publishing house that have resulted in a printed edition of the book, hence increasing awareness of the philosophy behind Free Culture beyond the blog community and into the general public.
(My many special thanks to Tian, Chenwei, Isaac and Yining for their thoughtful input into this post.)
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
|
Andrea |
The Free Culture Chinese Translation Project: A New and Innovative Form of Organization
It all started with a spontaneous scribble on a personal blog: Isaac Mao saw the steam gained by a few American bloggers who have took a creative spin and turned Lawrence Lessig's latest book Free Culture into a downloadable audio format. Inspired by that, he wondered aloud on his blog whether the book could be translated into Chinese.
Within the next 24 hours, the message was spread as a meme both within the Chinese blog community and as email messages in Mao's circle of friends. Chinese bloggers began to discuss the logistics of translating Free Culture from English into Chinese.
Two days after Mao's blog post, a wiki was setup and the Free Culture Chinese Translation Project thus began. The few bloggers who have initially expressed their interests in the translation effort became the first members of wiki project site. They used their social network to recruit people they know and trust to join the project. People who were recruited by the first few members in turn recruited new members.
From that point onwards, the project became a self-evolving system. It would progress without top-down coordination or a manager. Project members would translate or proofread the chapter they signed-up to work on. They would discuss and debate problems arose from translations. Self-motivated members would pro-actively identify new areas of project needs that ranged from virtual team-building, creating and growing a knowledge base with book reviews on Free Culture to making the book available in traditional Chinese characters for readers outside mainland China. From time to time, smaller sub-groups would also emerge to deal with ad-hoc issues such as correcting the misunderstanding of Free Culture by a translator who had mistakenly translated the term "Free Culture" into "Free-of-charge Culture" in the Chinese edition of Financial Times.
To date, the project has brought together about thirty Chinese speakers from a multidisciplinary background that included software development, architecture, law and publishing, just to name a few, to work on the Chinese translation. They come from literally all over the world: mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, Britain, Germany, Canada and the United States - with many of them have never met each other in person except on the internet, thus representing a breakthrough in Chinese norms of association - traditionally, it was an exception rather than a norm that people associate with strangers and people outside of their immediate social circles, not to mention those that were beyond their local native cultures.
More than just a new form of association and social organizing, the project also represents a new way of publishing in China. While traditionally the production of a book remained in the hands of a few professional editors, the project was subjected to ongoing peer review and feedback from the general public, thus help raised the quality of the translation. Project members could edit and comment on any chapters either by directly editing the text. They could also provide their comments in the general discussion area, the comments area specific to each chapter or by communicating directly with the translator. The general public can provide comments and feedback upon a click on the “comment” link available on each chapter of the translation.
The translation came to completion after four months of continuous and round the clock effort shared by project members around the world. A printed edition of the work has been lined up with a Chinese publishing house and will soon be available for circulation in China. It will also be converted into traditional Chinese characters and made available to the internet.
While the translation has been completed, the project would remain an active community of preachers and practitioners of Free Culture in the Chinese speaking world.
(My many special thanks to Tian, Chenwei, Isaac and Yining for their thoughtful input into this post.)
Within the next 24 hours, the message was spread as a meme both within the Chinese blog community and as email messages in Mao's circle of friends. Chinese bloggers began to discuss the logistics of translating Free Culture from English into Chinese.
Two days after Mao's blog post, a wiki was setup and the Free Culture Chinese Translation Project thus began. The few bloggers who have initially expressed their interests in the translation effort became the first members of wiki project site. They used their social network to recruit people they know and trust to join the project. People who were recruited by the first few members in turn recruited new members.
From that point onwards, the project became a self-evolving system. It would progress without top-down coordination or a manager. Project members would translate or proofread the chapter they signed-up to work on. They would discuss and debate problems arose from translations. Self-motivated members would pro-actively identify new areas of project needs that ranged from virtual team-building, creating and growing a knowledge base with book reviews on Free Culture to making the book available in traditional Chinese characters for readers outside mainland China. From time to time, smaller sub-groups would also emerge to deal with ad-hoc issues such as correcting the misunderstanding of Free Culture by a translator who had mistakenly translated the term "Free Culture" into "Free-of-charge Culture" in the Chinese edition of Financial Times.
To date, the project has brought together about thirty Chinese speakers from a multidisciplinary background that included software development, architecture, law and publishing, just to name a few, to work on the Chinese translation. They come from literally all over the world: mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, Britain, Germany, Canada and the United States - with many of them have never met each other in person except on the internet, thus representing a breakthrough in Chinese norms of association - traditionally, it was an exception rather than a norm that people associate with strangers and people outside of their immediate social circles, not to mention those that were beyond their local native cultures.
More than just a new form of association and social organizing, the project also represents a new way of publishing in China. While traditionally the production of a book remained in the hands of a few professional editors, the project was subjected to ongoing peer review and feedback from the general public, thus help raised the quality of the translation. Project members could edit and comment on any chapters either by directly editing the text. They could also provide their comments in the general discussion area, the comments area specific to each chapter or by communicating directly with the translator. The general public can provide comments and feedback upon a click on the “comment” link available on each chapter of the translation.
The translation came to completion after four months of continuous and round the clock effort shared by project members around the world. A printed edition of the work has been lined up with a Chinese publishing house and will soon be available for circulation in China. It will also be converted into traditional Chinese characters and made available to the internet.
While the translation has been completed, the project would remain an active community of preachers and practitioners of Free Culture in the Chinese speaking world.
(My many special thanks to Tian, Chenwei, Isaac and Yining for their thoughtful input into this post.)
