Promoting Utopian and Davinci Collaboration

Github Repository: https://github.com/utopian-io/utopian.io

The purpose of this Blog post is to promote the Utopian.io Translation Category that has come back live since June, 2018. Our aim is to create an international community of professional translators helping Open Source projects go global. New translation teams need to set up for different languages to fulfill this awesome mission. Being one of the Community Manager (CM) for Translation Category in Utopian, I will share with you the events and the process of how Utopian collaboration with the Davinci Team managed to bring back the translation category back to life! Every month, new translation teams are set up with qualified translators for different languages. Are you a professional translator? Come and join us!

The Long Awaited Translation Category To Come Back

Ever since March, 2018, the translation category in Utopian.io was put to a halt. All translation contributions had to pause for re-evaluation.

Before this time, the translation contributions were taking up about 70% of the overall contributions in Utopian for months.

Some days, there were at least 300 translation submissions per day. The sheer volume and the diversity of languages involved made it very difficult to maintain a high quality standard to be of value to FOSS projects.

From March to June, the whole category had to replan to ensure top quality translations for FOSS projects via Crowdin. A lot of restructuring and rebuilding needed to take place to get this category to reopen.

Many passionate translators in the Steemit international community had been waiting patiently for the day to come when Utopian relaunches the translation category.

Well, the day has finally come!

June 4, 2018 - Translation Category Re-launched

On the evening of June 3rd, I was invited by @elear to be the Community Manager (CM) for Utopian.io and the Language Community Moderator (LCM) for the Davinci Team.

I gladly accepted BOTH ROLES right away. This is indeed "too" exciting, to have such an important role in getting the translation category live in full power.

An announcement post was sent out immediately - Translations are coming back to Utopian. Get involved today!

Promoting the Utopian - Davinci Collaboration

Having been newly appointed to be the CM for both platforms, I quickly learned more about the Davinci Localization Curation Initiative.

The Davinci Witness aims to provide quality translations of valuable content in the Steem Blockchain.

So with this new Utopian-Davinci collaboration, we are expected to get on board qualified translators, and to select professional moderators to score the translations made via the Crowdin platform by Utopian.io contributors.

Here we come - Davinci meets Utopian.

Big Excitement in the Davinci Discord Channel

After a long silence of hibernation for 3 months, the excitement that took place in the Davinci Discord Channel on June 4th was overwhelming.

There were high enthusiasm and thrills as translators signed in with excitement. You need to be there to witness the people flooding in when the gate opened. For many, they had not talked to each other for 3 months so it was like *an unplanned class re-union*. People quickly settled in their language rooms and assigned their own teams with moderators to start translation. It was like the Animal Farm situation where nobody knew who was the head.

Actually I had no idea who I was supposed to be coworking with in the Davinci Team as everything happened too fast overnight. Soon enough, in less than 24 hours, the other 2 Community Language Moderators (CLM) appeared and we went to work right away with no time to waste.

Big Challenge: Verifying Qualifying Translation Teams

We truly had a big challenge on our hands. All the eager people were waiting for the whistle to blow. Some of the questions we had to face were:

• How do we select qualified professional Moderators?
• How do we verify translators who are suitable for the translating work?
• In the past, there were many Utopian moderators for translation. Many of them were not screened whether they were proficient in English or in their native language at all. How do we screen them now?
• As for translators, there were many translators who spammed the Utopian contributions with multiple accounts and using only machine translations. This time round, we cannot let these translators sneak in. How then do we verify excellent translators?

Requiring Everyone to Apply for Moderators and Translators

We really had to move fast to give guidance to people in the Discord Channel to calm them down. The fact that people were moderators before in Utopian doesn't mean that they automatically become moderators. The same can be said for translators.

Our task now is to get top quality Language Moderators (LM) and Translators (T).

I have been one of the Translation Moderator for Utopian.io since November, 2017. During the 5 months, I also realized where moderators and translators had failed. This time round, we cannot afford to make the same mistakes.

Having learned from past mistakes, we can't repeat them. We can't just follow the old ways of doing things and put a new cover on this 'relaunch'. Besides, this is a Utopian-Davinci collaboration. We need to find ways for the Davinci team to get to know all these Utopian people who are so eager in becoming Moderators and Translators in this new set up.

I said to myself: "We have heavy responsibility here. There needs some accountabililty in our assessment." On the one hand, we want to keep the diverse and multinational community of professional translators that are already on Utopian.io. And on the other hand, we need to attract new translation professionals to the Steem Blockchain and Utopian.io via the Davinci Discord Channel.

With all these thoughts filling my mind, I came up with a brilliant idea. We are going to require all candidates to apply for Moderator and Translator roles via a Steemit post. While I know these people from the 5 months of working in Utopian, this will give an opportunity for Davinci team to get to know who these people are in their applications. At the same time, this can also become a promotion on Steemit Blockchain to get some attention with all these applications.

This was how we started our first recruitment for everyone to apply via the Davinci Discord Channel. They were required to hand in their applications in the #job-application Room.

133 Applications came in within 3 DAYS

People were so excited that they quickly handed in their applications within 3 days. Can you believe this? We received 133 applications. Such enthusiasm was unexpected.

For their applications, the following was required:

1. Write a paragraph in English of why they are suitable for Moderator or Translator.
2. Translate that paragraph to their native language.
3. A voice over in reading the 2 paragraphs.

It was a real joy to see the sheer passionate responses in their applications. Some of them even wanted to DM me their certificates (and even their birth certificates for verification). So serious were they with their applications, that we, too, diligently read through EACH applications and listened attentively to their voice over.

So for those 5 days, we just worked around the clock. We didn't sleep. Sometimes it felt like there were more than 24 hours in a day - of course, because we worked through the endless hours such that we could not even tell the days from nights anymore. We didn't feel tired at all. Unbelievable!

Results of the First Recruitment

The following table will show you the statistics of the number of applicants for each language in descending order.

Language	Number of Applicatnts
Spanish	29
Filipino	19
Nigerian	16
Urdu	10
Italian	10
Indonesian	10
Greek	6
Arabic	5
Turkish	4
Polish	4
Chinese	4
Portuguese	3
Bengali	3
Vietnamese	1
Ukranian	1
Thai	1
Slovenian	1
Russian	1
Malyalam	1
Hindi	1
German	1
Dutch	1
Cebuano	1

From the assessment and the planning in the Utopian-Davinci Collaboration, the following 5 languages were officially launched for translation. Not all languages could go ahead as each language team needed to have qualified moderators to go forward.

Languages	Moderator	Translators
1. Greek	1	5
2. Spanish	1	5
3. Italian	1	3
4. Chinese	1	2
5. German	1	0

These 5 languages are the forerunners of the Translation Category relaunched in Utopian.io.

How to Contribute in Translation?

Only verified translators can contribute to get rewards from @Utopian-io. A special editor based on the Busy.org is created for submissions: https://davinci.utopian.io

Promoting Utopian Translation Category - Calling Out For Professional Translators

We are so excited for this new beginning of the Translation Category getting resurrected and starting afresh!

Can you feel the magnetic pull within us as we watch the Translation Category re-starting on the "right note" (You can tell I am a musician). This is the beginning of a beautiful love song that will keep us singing in these coming days.

Translation was gone and now back stronger! This category is fully alive and has been fully active for one month already in @Utopian-io. We are localizing some awesome Open Source Projects and getting them global with high quality translations so that everyone in the world can utilize them!

We are now surfing on this 'first wave' of the Utopian.io Translation Category. Can you hear the rising waves roaming behind us? The second wave is coming! Don't miss this. Don't get left behind. Join us now to surf together on this fun ride.

If you are a professional translator, get in touch with me @rosatravels or in the DaVinci Discord server.

Thank you for your attention,
Rosa
@rosatravels

Images Source: 1, 2

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Thank you for reading this post!

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