Aspiration, a nonprofit focused on connecting nonprofit organizations with the best software available, just released Open Translation Tools: Disruptive Potential to Broaden Access to Knowledge—a paper documenting learnings and outcomes from the first-ever Open Translation Tools Convergence.

You can learn more and download the paper from Aspiration's website here.

What does 'open translation tools' mean?

"Open content" was interpreted to encompass a range of resource types available under open licenses such as Creative Commons (CC) and Free Document License (FDL), ranging from books to manuals to documents to blog posts to multimedia. "Open translation tool" was interpreted to encompass any piece of software which supports or performs language translation, and which is distributed under a free or open source software (FOSS) license.

The Open Translation Tools Convergence took place last year (from November 29th - December 1st) in Zagreb, Croatia, bringing together two passionate communities: "those creating open source software tools to support translating open content, and those with a need for better tools to support translation of the open content they create."

Event background

Co-organized by Aspiration and Multimedia Institute (MI2), supported by the Open Society Institute, with additional support for participant travel provided by TechSoup, OTT07 concentrated only on translation tools supporting or enabling human translation of textual content.   Two groups formed during the event for mapping and learning, one focused on documenting current tools and the other on example cases.

The goal at OTT07 was to take a snapshot of the open translation tools that were available, and in turn to analyze the gaps.

To learn more about Aspiration's work and download Open Translation Tools, visit http://www.aspirationtech.org.