Ecosystem technical architecture

P.S. maybe we need to add "translatable" to the Open App requirements somewhere?

I think most concepts and statements are (literally) translateable. Do you mean something like "are compatible with one or more specific translation tools"?

Speaking for myself, @gregorycassel, I don't think "translatable" is related to translation tools. I guess some things, particularly technical things, can be translated with few issues. Personally, I've had much more experience of things that can be surprisingly tricky to translate. My experience is based mainly on English and Italian, with some awareness of French and a little Finnish. So I don't really understand you, Greg, when you say

"most concepts are (literally) translatable"

Can you give examples of the range of concepts that are translatable in this way, and perhaps any that you think may not be so easy?

Dependcs on how we define "translate". I think that few if any concepts, outside of extremely simple physical concepts, can be "perfectly" translated! I see translation as an art which tries to transport complex concepts into a new format.

With that in mind, I think that there are few concepts in most languages which can't be translated into other languages... however, "directly" translating one word into a word in a different language often is impossible.

BTW here's my definition of "concept" (in MOT):

A concept is an idea which relates elements.

That definition is unusual and certainly not well-known. It was however the basis of my statement which you quoted. (I think that relationships can usually be translated.)

Does that help to clarify somewhat?

What I mean by translatable is that everything in the user interface can be translated into different languages, and any given user can select their language of choice. See attached screenshots.

the other screenshot in Spanish
(apparently Joining Process has not been translated)

What I mean by translatable is that everything in the user interface can be translated into different languages

Okay, but "can be translated" by what? I guess you'd like to identify some specific translation tool or standard which data (and user interfaces) should be compatible with?

(For example, we could specify that data collected by OAE tools should be effectively translatable by Google Translate. Although I'd probably recommend some open source translation standard instead.)

I'm not sure how else "translateable" could be evaluated. I guess it'd be possible to create specifications for data entry formats which would make entered data easily translatable into most if not all languages-- but, I also guess that that'd be a huge R&D project.

The translation from English to Spanish was done by the Fair Coop community, which includes several excellent translators. They all collaborated to do the work using https://www.transifex.com/ which is not open source as far as I know, but is free for open source projects.

OCP uses the Django framework, which offers features for translation:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.11/topics/i18n/

Lynn and I did the technical translation setup in Django, and one of the Fair Coop devs did all the setup in Transifex.

I hope that makes it less mysterious.

The user-entered data is not yet translated, but one of the Fair Coop devs wants to set up the framework for that. Fair Coop is a multi-lingual organization, so more languages will follow. They are also setting up facilities for refugees, which means, even more languages.

So what I mean by "translatable" is having the kind of setup that Lynn and I did in Django, and possibly also the additional features for translating user-entered content.

That is a lot to ask for small projects, and I hesitate to require it. But increasingly, technical frameworks are providing facilities for translation, so it might be doable in many cases.

Thank you, @gregorycassel I'm a lot clearer about your position now.

My point, and I guess we largely agree, may be that it can be very inelegant, and may feel quite unnatural, to translate some concepts directly. The art may need further study and elaboration?

@bobhaugen -- does your idea of translatable then include the idea that terms are chosen so that they are not peculiar to one language? I'm guessing that maybe that's not your prime concern...

does your idea of translatable then include the idea that terms are chosen so that they are not peculiar to one language?

Has not, so far, but that's an interesting and maybe good idea. Do you think there might be a tradeoff between communicating clearly to the people who understand one language, and maybe adopting some term that might be more understandable as-is to people who speak other languages?

I can imagine two approaches.
1. Case by case, check with native speaker that terms translate well enough.
2. Go for an explicit conceptual model that doesn't rely on any particular natural language.

Caveat: I have no practical experience of this. I only imagine these approaches... :smiley:

Go for an explicit conceptual model that doesn't rely on any particular natural language.

Somebody proposed for Value Flows that all the concepts be numbered instead of named and then named by user communities. I think one of the @pedia projects does that - but it's not dbedia, I just checked them. They seem to have English language names with lots of alternate labels for different human languages. E.g. http://mappings.dbpedia.org/server/ontology/classes/Agent

Problem is, it every concept is identified only by a number, it gets really hard for anybody to work with. I think those problems could be helped with a good user interface, but then you need a user interface other than plain text, which imposes another technical requirement and more work for a small dev team.

So if I understand correctly, we will do like dbpedia.

Problem is, it every concept is identified only by a number, it gets really hard for anybody to work with.

Concepts are easier to remember by using words instead of numbers. I think that images/icons are even quicker and easier to remember than words. (Which is IMO why lots of national and international signs are based on visual iconography.)

I'm not suggesting we return to hieroglyphics instead of an alphabet (lol). However, I think it'd be easy to argue that a specific set of fundamental terms could be primarily identified by icons instead of words or numbers.

That would probably require a fairly small set of fundamental terms, using icons which are each effectively clear, distinctive and (at least somewhat) meaningful in their appearance.

Unfortunately I've been out of art school for years, so I don't have time to focus on that train of thought right now. One of my main ultimate goals though is to help develop more expressive and flexible visual languages, using the best lessons of historic iconography and logography.

BTW everyone, this is a technical architecture comment but it's quite specific and tangential. (Not trying to disrupt the thread.)

However, see also visual language experiments .

As that document warns, that is not the visual language (in terms of icons etc), just how the concepts fit together. My goal there, eventually, is to have a graphical editor that will allow different communities to compose their own systems from building blocks. The mythical software legos, which people have talked about for many years, but have seldom accomplished. I think it is doable. But might take more and longer than me...

Is there any shared document to follow the advancement of the work here ? :D

Not yet, as far as I know. A lot of discussions, maybe some agreement, maybe not. We might learn a lot more next week when we start on some actual collaborative work.

Replying to myself: the closest things I know of were the early docs published by Enspiral. A lot has happened since then.