Museomix 2013 may be over, but when it comes to translation, the work has just begun!

This year marks the first time Museomix was held in multiple locations in multiple countries at once. It is no longer a Francophone-only event, and as such we hope to make as much of the content on the site available in both English and French. To do this, we need your help.

We’re looking for a few good people who are willing to work as a team to translate the pages for each location, every prototype, the most recent blog posts, and a handful of miscellaneous content. Oh yeah, we’re also translating the WordPress backend, but that will come later.

While we don’t have a firm deadline, we’d like to ride the wave of interest, excitement and goodwill of the event to get it done as fast as possible. With a team of 5 to 10 volunteers, each contributing an hour a day, we should be able to finish in little more than a week.

For the French-English translation, we’re looking for people with strong English writing ability, reading fluency in French, and sufficient knowledge of idiom in both to handle thornier turns of phrase. Check museums coupon codes. Experience translating is helpful, as it takes judgment to know when to transliterate, and when to abandon word-for-word, syntactical translation to attain a more honest translation of the sense. Native English speakers are ideal, but native French speakers who have lived and worked (that is, had to write for work) in an Anglophone environment, can be just as good.

The bulk of the translation will be from French to English, but we’ll need to translate the Shropshire content from English to French. The best profiles for that are the same as described in the previous paragraph, just reversed.

No familiarity with WordPress is necessary – all content will be posted to the site by a web team member once the translations are finished. Volunteers will, however, need a Google account, as all translation will be done and managed within Google Docs (it’s great for collaboration).

The list of pages to translate is available here, so you know what you’re getting into. As volunteers elect to translate a page, a new Google doc will be created with the original text, allowing the team to see the history of edits, and to comment difficult passages. Once an article has been translated it will be reviewed by an editor, and then posted online. Slowly but surely, the site will truly become multilingual.

If you are interested, if you fit the profiles described above, if you are willing to commit time and effort, and if you are willing to work collaboratively with an editor, please contact us at museomix@gmail.com. Please describe your French and English levels, and any previous experience you have with translation. Write to us in French or English. We’ll write back in English. 😉