Medical Translation Project / Translation Task Force
The Medical Translation Project (also known as the Translation Task Force) – aims to bring high quality, easy to understand medical and health information into as many languages as we can. Together WikiProject Medicine, Wiki Project Med Foundation, and Translators Without Borders have translated over 600 articles and is working in more than 100 languages! Wiki Project Med Foundation and Translators Without Borders are both parts of the global initiative: Healthcare Information For All by 2015! We aim to translate content where it is needed the most−and are currently working on (but not limited to) articles on: Disease, Medication and Drugs, Anatomy, Nutrition, Sanitation, Home economics, and Women's health.
Get involved
Here are ways you can help!
- Community organization
- We need involved Wikipedians to engage the community on the different Wikipedias.
- Assessing content
- We need language knowledgeable Wikipedians (or not yet Wikipedians) who can indicate on our progress tables which articles should and should not be translated!
- Translating
- We are always on the look-out for dedicated translators to work with our content, especially in smaller languages!
- Integration
- Translated articles need to be integrated into local Wikipedias. This process is done manually, and needs to take into account older articles.
- Template installation
- For translations to be more useful templates and modules should be installed. We need people with the technical know-how who can help out!
- Programming
- Several of our processes are in need of simplification and many could occur automatically with bots.
- Writing content for the translation project
- Writing for translations may be slightly different from writing other articles on Wikipedia.
Why help?
Wikipedia is the most used health care resource on the Internet−both by unique visitors and by pageviews. For all those interested in global health this is an opportunity to help bring high quality healthcare information to the world.
In the beginning the effort is primarily concentrating on 80 top importance medical articles of global significance. Currently they are put together as a Wikipedia Book in English at Book:Health care and in simple English here. In the month of February 2012 these pages in English received a total of 10.6 million page views.[1] A more in depth breakdown can be found at popular pages of the translation taskforce
As of July 2014, the more than 500 full articles translated via this project received nearly one million pages views as per here.
Progress
In 2013 1.92M words were translated, equivalent to a donation of $384,440. In 2014 0.91M words were translated, equivalent to a donation of $181,201.
Full | Simplified | |
---|---|---|
Year started | 2011 | 2013 |
Article goal # | 100 | 1000 |
Articles ready for translation |
33 | 47 |
Language goal # | 50 | 100 |
Translations done | 551 | 91 |
FA/GA translations | 27 | - |
Translations needing integration | 35 | 48 |
Press
Imagine if all our health information was available only in Dutch!
We are working to build a world where knowledge doesn't have borders
- "Translators fight the fatal effects of the language gap" The Guardian, April 11, 2012
- "Leveraging the Web to Overcome Challenges in the Developing World", EContent Magazine, July 5, 2012
- "Translating Health Content Without Borders", Global Voices, August 30, 2012
- "Doctors and Translators Are Working Together to Bridge Wikipedia's Medical Language Gap", Global Voices & Wikimedia Blog, July 27, 2014
- "A Fight for Awareness in the Age of Globalization, Huffington Post, October 2, 2014