Assessing User Needs for a Wiki Translation Resource

Professional translators are among the heaviest users of dictionaries, terminological resources, encyclopedias and other reference material. The resources they employ (e.g. Termium, Grand Dictionnaire Terminologique, IATE , the Robert-Collins bilingual dictionary) tend to be proprietary and have very tightly controlled editing policies. Typically, their content can only be edited by highly qualified terminologists working for the organization that produced them. The advent of collaborative wiki resources like Wikipedia and Wiktionary, challenge this assumption of tight edit control [3]. Indeed, using an open editing policy, Wikipedia was able to achieve, in the short span of three years, a level of coverage and accuracy comparable to that of Encyclopedia Brittanica [4]. Given this, it is natural to ask whether translators could benefit from a more open and non proprietary resource. One whose content would be created collaboratively by a wider community which might include translators or even the public at large. In the rest of this paper, we will refer to this type of resource as a wiki translation resource (or simply wiki resource when the context makes it clear that we are talking about a resource for translators).