Wikipedia Reveals New Sides of Translation
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The students from Brusov State University did their internship at Wikimedia Armenia. The students' internship was quite successful. They have created a variety of articles available on the Armenian Wikipedia. And now they are also a small part of Wiki community.
Since 11th February 2020, 30 students with bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Faculty of Translation of the Brusov State University have spent a one-month internship in the office of “Wikimedia Armenia”.
We can say, that the Wikimedia Armenia NGO revealed new sides of translation for us. If by saying “written translation”, we understand that the translator works with the provided content and just translates it, in Wikipedia, it’s not enough. Besides having skills for translation, you need to have special skills for working on Wikipedia. These skills provide the creation of an article that coincides with the standards of Wikipedia. At first sight, these quite difficult new skills can distract the translator and can demand double work from the translator. For instance, if the translator can translate the text in one hour, in case of working with articles in Wikipedia, you will need approximately two hours to finish the work, but it is only at the beginning of your work.
Due to hard work and efforts, all difficulties will be overcome and everything will seem quite easy. Wikipedia gives a chance to a translator to choose an article which he/she prefers more and this choice gives an opportunity to the translator to develop his/her skills in a specific sphere. Such translations both improve the skills of a translator and give a chance to reveal and develop new skills.
Students have not only translated but also proofread articles translated by their classmates. Students, who were divided into several groups consisting of 2 people, proofread the articles translated by other students in order to check if there is consistency in the text and there aren’t any literal translations in the article. Besides the mentioned points, they needed to pay attention to the use of literary devices and the figures of speech. The aim of the proofreading process was to ensure that all these rules, which are important for the translator, are kept in the article.
We did this internship with a lot of interest and willingness. Before the internship many students used Wikipedia and many of them were interested in how and who created the articles.
And now we are also a part of it and we know that articles pass a long way before appearing in Wikipedia. This practice gave us a chance to work with specialists in a nice atmosphere. In case of any little problem, we immediately got support from experienced Wikipedians. All of us had a chance to use our professional skills, to translate different texts, to get additional information and, of course, to do teamwork, during which we exchanged our experience and had our little contribution to Armenian Wikipedia. The internship finished on 24th March 2020. Due to Bryusov State University’s students’ collective work, 153 new articles were created in Armenian Wikipedia, 7 articles were improved, in total 5,198,252 bytes.