Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Translation task force

This is an effort to translate health care's most important topics from English into as many other languages as possible. It is an undertaking initiated by Wikiproject Medicine, Wikimedia Canada, and Translators Without Borders and is expected to carry on for a number of years.

List of topics

The effort is primarily concentrating on the 70-80 top importance medical articles of global significance. Currently they are put together as a WP:Book in English at Book:Health care.

Process

The process will involve:

Bringing the core topics up to WP:GA or WP:FA status by updating the pages on the English Wikipedia using secondary sources (carried out by members of Wikiproject Medicine)
Translating the article to simple English (carried out by Content Rules )
Translating the articles from simple English to as many other languages as possible (carried out by TWB)
Reintegration of articles back into the appropriate language wiki (carried out by Wikipedians in those languages → currently recruiting )

Bringing topics up to GA or FA status

We wish to bring all topics up to WP:GA or WP:FA status before they are translated such that we can get the biggest benefit out of this effort.

Translating the article to simple English

We have created the outline of the book of articles over on the simple English Wikipedia. As they are translated into simple English they will be integrated there.

Translating the articles to as many other languages as possible

The translation will take place from the simple English edition of the articles to make the work easier for the volunteers who many of which will not have a medical background.

This will be done in Translators without Borders's translation center, powered by ProZ.com
A translation center profile has been created for Wikipedia with James Heilman as contact person.
The translation center includes FAQs and user manual

Reintegration of articles back into the appropriate language wiki

These will be taken care of by Wikipedians local to he language in question. We have a couple of volunteers for the Swahili Wikipedia but will need people for other languages as time goes on.

Previous efforts at translation

A previous collaboration with Google in 2010 translated a number of medical articles into Swahili, Spanish, and Arabic.Google Project and Googles Blog Our goal is to build upon this.

People involved (with language ability)

Please added one of these to your user page

This user is a member of the Medicine WikiProject Translation Taskforce. This person may be a new user recruited by Doc James, so please be nice.

This user is a member of the WikiProject Medicine Translation Taskforce.

Also drop me a note on my talk page if anyone encounters difficulties with the community.

To do

Press release

Translators Without Borders and Wikipedia's Wikiproject Medicine would like to announce a partnership to improve the free global access to high quality health information. Wikipedia, as many are aware, is one of the foremost health care information resources. It is freely usable by all people globally and can be re-purposed or changed for other uses as long as Wikipedia is acknowledged and the resulting product is released under a license that allows the same. Wikipedia's 26,000 medical articles receive approximately 150-200 million page views a month in English alone with some content available in over 280 other languages. The top 300 medical articles receive more than 100,000 page views a month[1] and it is used extensively by both health care providers and the lay public with between 50-70% of physicians using it in clinical practice.

Availability of high quality content is however limited in many languages. Even in English less than 1% of articles have passed a semi formal peer review process. Our efforts are attempting to both improve the English content and translation articles on humankind's 80 most important health care conditions to as many other languages as possible. This will be for many people the first time high quality health information becomes available in their own language. We are looking for people to both help us at Wikipedia improve articles in English and people to help Translators Without Borders do translation. We are also needing people with both language abilities and the ability or desire to learn how to edit Wikipedia to integrate the translated material back in the Wikipedia edition in question. This project is just beginning and we are planning on caring it out over the next three to five years. If you wish further details or want to become involved feel free to contact me.

Project summary for TWB

In order to post the articles for translation in the translation center, a project must be created, including a name, a summary and a description.
The project summary (up to 200 chars) will be included in the notification sent to the volunteers so this is one of your strongest tools to get their attention and potential commitment.
The project description should explain in a few paragraphs what is the reason behind the translation project, why the translation will make a difference by helping mitigate damages or risks, by improving education, etc. The project description should also provide information useful for the translators, such as variance of the target language to be used, register, cultural level of the people who will use the translation, etc.
This is a draft of the project name, summary and description. Feedback and editing will be welcome:

Project name

Wikipedia health care information for the world

Project summary (up to 200 chars)

The translation of Wikipedia articles on globally significant health care problems has the potential to improve peoples lives worldwide. Thank you for joining us.

Project description

There is a serious need for good medical (and more specifically health care) information in most languages. There is a wealth of information everywhere, but language is a barrier that in many cases prevents people in need from making good use of it.
In particular the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., the American non-profit charitable organization operates several online collaborative wiki projects including Wikipedia. Volunteers have created, primarily in English, many high quality medical articles considered critical in terms of relevance to global health.
As part of this project, several of these articles will be first improved in their source form in terms of simplicity, and afterwards these "simple English" versions will be offered to "Translators without Borders" volunteers for translation into several languages.
It is believed that this project will have a significant impact on the availability of good health care information wordwide and that this, in turn, is likely to save many lives and to improve the quality of life of many people globally.