To all Translia administrators and translators.

We're currently translating the Translia website pages from English into several languages.

I am dead positive everyone can relate to this :

Within a given language, several competing translations of the one same international english web-environment terms appear.

Because of
a) the built-in Translia parsing of body-text files into segments
b) the very parting of the Translia website translation files into non-simultaneous projects (such as Translia part 1, part 2, part 3, lastly part 4)

consistency in the translation of specific terms is severely wanting.

Examples of this abound :

- (translation) job
- (translation) project
- (e)mail
- kudo points
- referrents
- aggregator
- credits
- politeness form pronouns in languages - unlike English - featuring them

Sad to say : all of the above are currently being translated differently from project to project.

To illustrate this sorry state, I could go on paragraph after paragraph mentioning the alarming discrepancies plaguing the French, Spanish and German translation into which I am participating.
And those are but a small sample of all the world languages Translia operates with.

I was the one who launched the idea of a poll to decide whether a definite politeness form over another one should be preferred or not in Spanish.
Since this has been kindly implemented by Vic Dickson, the poll pool is now growing day by day, showing a definite tendency towards one term of the proposed alternative. So eventually, we will see daylight on this.

A small triumph, but still a triumph.

Now let's sit and think for a second. What is Translia ?

1) Humbly put, another web platform for translation
2) Proudly speaking, y bunch of innovators pioneering crowd-sourcing, or as Vic Dickson prefers to put it, "global translation"
3) .... last but not least : a BUSINESS.

So let's walk in the average Translia prospect's shoes for a while.
Translia website presentation, not only at web-page level, but far more at LANGUAGE level is bound to EPITOMIZE what Translia is selling : QUALITY TRANSLATION.
And UNITY is precisely one undeniable telltale aspect of quality.

How to address this ?

We all know that there is no such thing as impartial arbitration.
Behind titles are humans with drives, and let's be honest, a translator's drive for being *right* is huge.
(Not because of ego, but because of the dignifying urge to stick to what one believes is the *right* thing)

But then again, Translia is offering us the unique chance of TEAMING UP FOR THE BEST.

The solution reads : POLLS

Polls on Translia, like Election in a Democracy !
(By which token, *Every Transliator is a democrat*, indeed, such is the very gist of the translian revolution !)

Conclusion : It's urgent we made more ample, why not systematic use of the poll feature to DEFINITELY orientate ourselves into precise, once for all undisputed directions as far as *generic* Translia website terms are concerned.

In a first pass, let's draw lists of all problematic terms and submit for each of them various options to polling.

Moving on, MULTIPOLLS should be implemented, enabling us with the possibility to submit MULTIPLE ENTRIES AT ONCE.
Multipolls would :
- include a deadline for the projects not to stall
- determine the minimal majority to reach before an outcome becomes validated (I believe two-thirds would be a realistic threshold)
- oblige the LAST REVISOR of a given segment to re-implement the *definitively selected* version of a term, to a modicum of retribution (since this is a bit of a "chore" task, its cost would be minimal but still not nil, I leave this side to the administrators), and if the last revisor did not do it, then either any other contributor could choose to do it to the price in question, or in absence of anyone, the administrators would have to do it themselves and deduct the entailed cost divided by the number of segment contributors to each segment contributor's earnings. (sorry for going so boringly technical, I am just outlining)
- a glossary of those terminology would automatically be generated by the system, growing day by day, to be consulted by every transliator at any time.
- this glossary would ease intervention on further jobs created by those clients who need such terms translated, thereby conveying increased credibility on Translia's part, because of a secure *reference frame*. Eventual clients' commentaries / criticisms would no longer be shots in the dark, but so to speak backed by Translia itself, therefore discouraging unjustified complaints and other uninvited pettifogging.
To put it simply, if you know that it took 10 or 100 qualified people to rack their brains on a given problem before converging to some solution, you're far less likely to come up with peremptoriness.

My two cents

Panglosse