Grants talk:Project/Università degli Studi di Bari "Aldo Moro"/Translatathon@Uniba: Developing Transversal Competences in a Complex Multilingual Ecosystem

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Eligibility provisionally confirmed, Round 2 2021 - Research and Software proposal[edit]

This Project Grants proposal is under review!

We've provisionally confirmed your proposal is eligible for review in Round 2 2021 for Research and Software projects, contingent upon:

  • confirmation that the project will not depend on staff from the Wikimedia Foundation for code review, integration or other technical support during or after the project, unless those staff are part of the Project Team.
  • compliance with our COVID-19 guidelines.

Schedule delay

Please note that due to unexpected delays in the review process, committee scoring will take place from April 17 through May 2, instead of April 9-24, as originally planned.

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  • After the scoring period ends, you are welcome to make further changes to your proposal in response to committee comments.

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  • You must include a COVID-19 planning section in your activities plan. In this section, you should provide a brief summary of how your project plan will meet COVID-19 guidelines, and how it would impact your project if travel and offline events prove unfeasible throughout the entire life of your project.

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We look forward to engaging with you in this Round!

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Marti (WMF) (talk) 05:33, 17 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Aggregated feedback from the committee for Translatathon@Uniba: Developing Transversal Competences in a Complex Multilingual Ecosystem[edit]

Scoring rubric Score
(A) Impact potential
  • Does it have the potential to increase gender diversity in Wikimedia projects, either in terms of content, contributors, or both?
  • Does it have the potential for online impact?
  • Can it be sustained, scaled, or adapted elsewhere after the grant ends?
6.3
(B) Community engagement
  • Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often?
  • Does it have community support?
5.3
(C) Ability to execute
  • Can the scope be accomplished in the proposed timeframe?
  • Is the budget realistic/efficient ?
  • Do the participants have the necessary skills/experience?
6.0
(D) Measures of success
  • Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success?
  • Are they realistic?
  • Can they be measured?
6.5
Additional comments from the Committee:
  • The project fits many WMF key objectives.
  • Does this involve paid editing? How would this project create a sustainable basis for impact after the project ends?
  • The project fits the strategic priorities of wikimedia. It can be sustainable and used in other communities.
  • The potential to be developed in the project seems interesting. I don't know if Wikipedia communities like about create translated contents. I would like to see comments from the community about this. But the project seems feasible to do the project and well thought out.
  • The applicant nears to clarify: what are the research objectives?
  • The project takes innovative approach to solving key problems. The potential impact of the project is greater than risk. The project has an evaluation plan that measures the outcomes of the project
  • The budget is ambiguous about how will be used in the grant development. Please provide a more detailed breakdown and explanation of the budget.
  • Grantee is not active on it.wikipedia but volunteers are. What is the grantees experience with it.wikipedia?
  • no detailed breakdown of budget, not sure it is should be so high.
  • The scope of the project can be done in 12 months. The project is very realistic because it’s seek to focus on translations in English-Italia with the support from staff and student volunteers. The applicant has the necessary skills with his team, but there would be training for other staff members and student of various programs to enable them be able to translate.
  • The project targets a foci group in the University of Bari in Italy and also engaging some wikimedian communities too. I could see the project is also seeking support from other community platforms to increase the support (i.e. village pump) The project supports diversity, thus the project seeks to involve the LGBT group and females (gender-gap associated)
  • As offline meeting, the grant would be funded, but as research, without clear research objectives, seems not aligned with this kind of grants. There needs to be a clear statement of why this is a research proposal.
  • Where is the research? Good project but in the wrong grant session.
  • I don't understand what is different here: we had such projects lots of times and they don't lead to people editing outside the project or creating some wave of new editors who invite other editors and so on. How would this project create sustained engagement from participants after the program ends? How will it cultivate self-motivated participants?
  • I fully support this project because it meets the movement strategic orientation for 2030 and also it diverse and the translation aspect of it which is the future of wikipedia is good for our global audience not only Italia.

Opportunity to respond to committee comments in the next week

The Project Grants Committee has conducted a preliminary assessment of your proposal. Based on their initial review, a majority of committee reviewers have not recommended your proposal for funding. You can read more about their reasons for this decision in their comments above. Before the committee finalizes this decision, they would like to provide you with an opportunity to respond to their comments.

Next steps:

  1. Aggregated committee comments from the committee are posted above. Note that these comments may vary, or even contradict each other, since they reflect the conclusions of multiple individual committee members who independently reviewed this proposal. We recommend that you review all the feedback carefully and post any responses, clarifications or questions on this talk page by 5pm UTC on Thursday, May 13, 2021. If you make any revisions to your proposal based on committee feedback, we recommend that you also summarize the changes on your talkpage.
  2. The committee will review any additional feedback you post on your talkpage before making a final funding decision. A decision will be announced Thursday, May 27, 2021.


Questions? Contact us at projectgrants (_AT_) wikimedia  · org.

Marti (WMF) (talk) 16:48, 7 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Mjohnson (WMF):

First of all I wish to thank the reviewers for all their comments which give me an opportunity to clarify some aspects of the project which had remained on the background in my previous articulation.

In general terms I acknowledge that being based on the practice of translatathons the project might seem scarcely research-oriented. On the contrary the project builds on a number of successful Translatathons carried out on Wikimedia projects, (including it.wikipedia) at the University of Bari over the past three years (2018-2021) to open up to an investigation of the immense potential of the byproduct of Wikipedia-based translation teaching activity, which moslty runs the risk of remaining unexplored. In particular, the identification/creation of translated parallel/comparable Wikipedia pages, the observation of translation strategies and patterns in the texts, the identification of potential for improvement and the detection of debatable/controversial interwiki links represent significant aspects of those translation foci in Wikipedia which have started attract attention in the literarure (Shuttleworth 2017). Furthermore the potential of all these data for reuse in the compilation of parallel/comparable multilingual resources for trainee and professional translators, and the implications for translation pedagogy of the cooperative translation process which as the basis of the Wikipedia-based activities, would deserve time in dedicated follow-up research oriented activities after a translatathon ends (Gatto forthcoming). Against this backgorund the projects aims to integrate translatathons into a wider research project whose primary aime is to use the evidence and data resulting from translatathons to study the the impact of Wikipedia-based cooperative translation activities at academic level from the perspective of translation pedagogy (with specific reference to constructivism and complexity theory) and at providing a focused investigation and a better understanding of Wikipedia as a complex multilingual ecosystem from the perspective of an integrated approach combining translation Studies and Wikipedia studies.

Moving on to more specific comments, I would like to stress that paid editing is by no means an option in this project. The grant is aimed at hiring research staff to help organize and run Translatathons and then collect and analyse the parallel/comparable language data resulting from the translatathons themselves from the perspective of both Wikipedia Studies and Translation Studies. In particular, the project is aimed at contributing to the current debate on “Wikipedia in Academia” (Petrucco – Gallo 2020), from the specific perspetctive of translation didactics (Perez 2019; Gatto forthcoming) and provide useful data for a more comprehensive description of what has been labelled as the “dark matter” of translation in Wikipedia (Shuttleworth 2017).

As to the sustainability of the project, the very opportunity for a University to have at their disposal dedicated staff engaged for one year only with research in the field of “Translation-via-Wikipedia” activities is expected to have a long term impact. By fully integrating Wikipedia translatathons in the life of the University not simply as single/isolated events aimed at providing the students with opportunities for translation practice but also as the source of data for research, which is a University’s first mission, the project will promote the interaction between the academia and the Wikipedia community on a firmer – hopefully continuing - basis. We wish to stress that running Translatathons at our university over the past three years has increased interest in this kind of activities, and the very integration of each new event into the formal offer of the University, with ECTS (credits) awarded to the students actively taking part in the Translatathons certainly contributes to the sustainability of the project.

On a practical level, we plan to encourage repeat participants by inviting students who have already taken part in translatathons in one year to return as tutors/mentors for younger students in the following year. This also is expected to help produce a sustainable impact on the long term.

As to the research objectives, as stated above, they are mainly related to the exploration of the immense potential of the the product of translatathons. Specific areas of investigation will be:

  • the characteristics of translated text in Wikipedia;
  • the nature of Wikipedia articles as a hybrid type of writing (i.e part translation, part original).
  • the evolution of Wikipedia translations (and, more generally, texts) through successive drafts;
  • the role played by the cultural context and by ideology in language transfer;
  • the impact of Wikipedia in translation pedagogy;
  • the impact of translation in enhancing/impairing the quality of Wikipeida pages.
  • the accuracy and appropriateness of interwiki links

Actvities concerining the creation of multilingual resources will include:

  • use of computational/corpus linguistics techniques to identify keywords in pairs/groups of corresponding Wikipedia pages in different language versions
  • creation of Wikipedia based multilingual comparable/parallel language resources (in the form of corpora)
  • use of translated Wikipedia pages to feed CAT (Computer Aided Transaltion) tools
  • terminology extraction from Wikipedia articles

As a Grantee I cannot boast being active on it.wikipedia, though all the activities I have organized at the University have seen contionuous participation and support by expert Wikimedians (Ferdi2005, Nicolabel and Codas) and have enjoyed full support by Wikimedia Italia. My reliability with reference to the project basically rests on my role as an Associate Professor of English Linguistics and Translation Studies at the University of Bari, which ensure full acknowledgment of the potential synergy between Wikipedia and the academia, and my publication record which includes several titles directly addressing Wikipedia from a research perspective:

  • Centripetal and Centrifugal forces in Web 2.0 genres. The case of Wikipedia., in Evolving Genres in Web-mediated Communication, pp.151-174, 2012, ISBN 9783034310130
  • Making History. Representing "Bloody Sunday" in Wikipedia., in Lingue e Linguaggi, vol. 19, pp. 179-196, ISSN 2239-0359, DOI 10.1285/i22390359v19p179.
  • (forthcoming) Out of the (sand)box. Developing translation competence via Wikipedia., in Proceedings of the XXIX AIA Conference, Padova, 5 – 7 September 2019

More significantly, I have successfully coordinated a number of Translatathons at my University.

Needless to say that my personal engagement with the project as a supervisor of the prospective research staff and as teaching staff responsible for the Transaltathons is free and can be seen as co-financing in-kind.

As to the budget, the research grant is aimed at covering a one year research grant at the University of Bari, whose cost is 25.000. The remaining budget is meant to support at least one conference. The research staff is expected to work 350 hours (individual study and dissemination actvities excluded). While the comprehensive sum of 25.000 euros cannot be further subdivided, here below we list a detailed prospect of the activities that the research staff is expected to carry out with approximate reference to the minimum number of hours to be allotted to each task:

Expense Hrs Cost
Launch event (see project for details) n.a. € 500
Closing confernece (see project for details) n.a. € 2000
Training workshop 12 no cost
Translatathons and follow-up activities € 25.000
Helping in the organization of 5 Translatathons (considering that each Translatathon run at the university of Bari requires at least 21 contact hours) 105
Preparing translation tasks for 5 translatathons 30
Supervising group work and cooperative translation process during the Translatathons and revise the translation product for language accuracy (in collaboration with University teaching staff) 30
Coordinating the revision of the translation product for content (supervision of peer review by fellow students, in collaboration with domain experts) and for Wikimedia standard (in collaboration with Wikimedia volunteers and with University teaching staff with advanced editing skills) 15
Analysis of the data produced by the translation products 100
Creation of new translation-oriented resources 50
Investitigation of the impact of real-life cooperative translation projects on the development of translation didactics 50

--Maristella Gatto (talk) 16:51, 13 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Round 2 2021 decision[edit]

This project has not been selected for a Project Grant at this time.

We love that you took the chance to creatively improve the Wikimedia movement. The committee has reviewed this proposal and not recommended it for funding. This was a very competitive round with many good ideas, not all of which could be funded in spite of many merits. We appreciate your participation, and we hope you'll continue to stay engaged in the Wikimedia context.

Comments regarding this decision:
The proposed project represents a potentially interesting approach to using editing activities to explore research topics related to translation. However, the actual research component on the project was not clearly enough described in the proposal. For example, it was difficult to discern the precise research questions to be solved. There was not enough discussion of how the outcomes will be different from the usual ContentTranslation Tool output. If you were to try to submit this proposal again in the research category, we recommend that you take care to bring more rigor to your articulation of your research process, and to include a reference section linking to the citations for previous research published that is relevant to your proposed further investigations.

Next steps: Applicants whose proposals are declined are welcome to consider resubmitting your application again in the future. You are welcome to request a consultation with staff to review any concerns with your proposal that contributed to a decline decision, and help you determine whether resubmission makes sense for your proposal.

Over the last year, the Wikimedia Foundation has been undergoing a community consultation process to launch a new grants strategy. Our proposed programs are posted on Meta here: Grants Strategy Relaunch 2020-2021. If you have suggestions about how we can improve our programs in the future, you can find information about how to give feedback here: Get involved. We are also currently seeking candidates to serve on regional grants committees and we'd appreciate it if you could help us spread the word to strong candidates--you can find out more here. We will launch our new programs in July 2021. If you are interested in submitting future proposals for funding, stay tuned to learn more about our future programs.
Marti (WMF) (talk) 22:07, 27 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]