Critical issues presentations/Translating Wikipedia as an educational tool
- Submission no. 179
- Title of the submission
Translating Wikipedia as an educational tool
- Author of the submission
- Santiago Navarro Sanz
- Country of origin
Spain
- Topics
Projects
- Keywords
- Wikipedia
- translation studies
- university
- education
- language learning
- Abstract
Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects provide us educative tools to develop new programs in educational institutions, like universities. We can read, and edit, Wikipedia in more than 280 languages. Then, Wikipedia can be used as an educational tool for Translation studies at University.
Wikipedia provides us sources in many languages and in free licenses to be translated by translation students. The use of Wikipedia, as a wiki, let them know new technologies and tools, work in teams and check the work done by other students. When their work is published on Wikipedia, it is accessible by everybody, and gives them a broad public and great motivation that is difficult to achieve translating traditional works which only their professor reads.
Since 2010, Translation and Communication department of Jaume I University of Castellón (Spain) and Wikimedia Spain work together in an educational project on Wikipedia: Universitat Jaume I – E-translating / Aprendices de traducción con la Wikipedia. The team (Dr María Calzada, Dr Kim Schulte and other team members) developed an educational program since academic year 2010-11, recognized as Educational Innovative Project in 2015.
Students translate Wikipedia articles from English to Spanish (since 2010) and Spanish to English (since 2014-15). Also Catalan will be included. After six years the project has been improved and the main problems fixed. We are still looking for improve the project and at the same time to expand it. This year a similar project in Murcia University has been created and German included. During six years, more than 400 students have edited on Wikipedia in English, Spanish and German, and they created more than 70 articles.
This presentation wants to give an opportunity to other wikimedians and professors to reply the project, but avoiding the issues we solved during these years, and of course to get new ideas to improve it. Also a project in Arabic and English was developed in Durham University by Dr Khaled Al-Shehari based on this one, and other professors from different countries are interested in it.
The presentation wants to show the main parts of the project, the problems we have had and how to solve it, and the problems we still have and how we deal with it. We want to analyze its weakness and strength, so, not only what worked, but also our mistakes and how could we solve them and improve the project. We hope that this could be a source of inspiration for other people and they can reply the project in other countries and languages, joining the network we are creating.
Links:
https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viquip%C3%A8dia:Projecte_educatiu/Universitat_Jaume_I_-_E-translating
- Result
Accepted as reserve