The Impact of Technology on the World of Writing
Massive online collaboration is revolutionizing the way content is translated and consumed worldwide. This will also have a significant impact on how we translate content. In this article, I discuss what may be some of these effects, and invite the writing community as a whole.
Open writing can lead to new and better solutions to old problems. In particular, it can lead to the improvement of terminology (TD) and writing (TM) databases. TDs and TMs are the two technological pillars of modern writing. Together, they have brought significant achievements in translator productivity, enabling more consistent writing of large documents by teams. In a sense, collaborative technologies act as reservoirs of collective expertise. But it does not act massively at any stage of imagination, because the number of people who can contribute content to them is very limited. For example, although a database of public terms can be browsed by thousands of people around the world, its contents can only be edited by a very small number of expert terminologist people at the Canada Writing Bureau. Furthermore, while TM may be consulted by hundreds of translators (in the case of a large organization), the ability to add content to its database tends to be limited to a much smaller group of experts.
On the one hand, we will have very large communities of terminologists and translators sharing content in very large open resources. For example, the essay writing industry. These resources will in fact form a solid and solid backbone but open and free from which everyone can benefit. On the other hand, we will have a large number of organizations, each translating in specific areas and for specific purposes, as well as with specific workflows and operating platforms. This is where proprietary tool vendors will be able to operate, by providing tools to such organizations that are perfectly suited to their needs and will be able to work and perform their work smoothly and optimally across the workflow of the organization. To this I will add that, tool providers may also be able to sell services and support to help organizations deploy such tools efficiently. These tools are proprietary however will need to link with larger open “MOC” resources in case they are interested in providing optimum value to users and organizations. For example, if a particular term or phrase is not found in a local resource, the system may look at the larger but more generic open resource
In short, open and massive TDs and TMs are likely to play an important role in the writing industry in the coming years. While it may seem naive to think that quality linguistic resources can be reached high through such a process, it should be remembered that only five years before that, the idea of Wikipedia also sounded very naive to most people. However, we now have proof by construction that it can work.
Gloss