New Aspiration Book: Open Translation Tools

Aspiration has been a leading advocate for Open Translation, a nascent field of practice emerging at the crossroads of three dynamic movements of the information and internet eras: Open Content, Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS), and Open/Peer Production. Open Translation is the set of practices and work processes for translating and maintaining open content using FLOSS tools, and leveraging the internet to make that content and those tools available to the largest number of authors and readers.There is a diverse set of Open Translation software that supports or performs language translation, but relatively little has been written about these disruptive tools to date. As part of Open Translation Tools 2009, Aspiration co-hosted the first ever Open Translation Book Sprint. The Sprint generated two separate books: a 283-page volume entitled Open Translation Tools, describing the landscape of open translation tools, and a second 124-page book entitled Video Subtitling and focused solely on that topic as a specific case of translation and localization. The sprint was organized in partnership with FLOSSManuals, and use of the FLOSSManuals.net platform made it straightforward to remix and reuse content from the main book to create the second, and then to add and manage additional content in the second book.Utilizing the FLOSSManuals.net platform, the two books are now maintained in an open, ﾓwiki-likeﾔ environment where anyone who wishes to can contribute additional material, and maintainers of the book can vet contributions for appropriateness and accuracy.Open Translation Tools 2009 and the Open Translation Book Sprint were generously supported by the Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation.