Translation and derived copies

Brent had brought up with me the issue that he thought translations of content in Connexions would need to be done differently than our current forking system. I believe this was for a few reasons, including copyright issues; feature abilities (such as putting on the original content's page a list of links to all of its translations); and for the sake of differentiating between what one might consider a faithful transference of the content into a different language and a more altered derivative work, such as an expansion, critique, abridgment, restructuring, or adaptation.

I thought about this some, and it also came up briefly at the weekly meeting, so I wanted to write some of my thoughts here, and hopefully everybody then will comment on this blog entry if they have more feedback/ideas.

I think there are essentially two issues (well, probably more) that Connexions needs to address with regard to making a separate translation function. One concerns integrity of the translation, and the other concerns what a translation is.

The integrity, or faithfulness, of the translation is an issue Connexions must deal with uniquely because of our use of the Creative Commons attribution license. Under other circumstances, the author has exclusive rights (under the Berne Convention) to any translations, and I would think that most often, the translator would collaborate with the author to ensure integrity, and that translation would be subject to author review and approval prior to publication. (And in the case of translation of public domain or dead authors' works, I assume it would be subject to review by a publisher (in contrast to Connexions' postpublication-review method)).

So say I want to translate one of Kitty Jones's modules into Spanish. Would I then need to collaborate with her? Would I need her to approve role requests before I could publish? Would I have maintainer-like priveleges (and be given maintainer-like credit)? Would I have exclusive rights to the Spanish translation of that module, or could others also translate their own Spanish versions? Would it matter that I am an amateur translator, instead of a professional, so that while integrity might be my goal, it may not actually be the final result?

Obviously, I can currently publish my own translated version of her module w/o her collaboration by forking a copy, but then I wouldn't get any of the potential benefits of having a separate translation function, such as a listing on the original module's page (an idea brought up in the meeting). Is that good/fair?

The other issue concerns how we define translation. The term can be interpreted broadly, to include any sort of transference of the original message, including intralingual transferences (e.g., academic jargon -> street slang, college-level -> K12), to what most people think of it as: interlingual transferences. Should we only use certain languages, based on certain standards (e.g. as discussed here)? Or should people be able to translate into any language they choose? Do artificial languages count? Do intralingual translations count, or do we just consider these derivative works?

Another issue, but which will probably be determined by answering the above questions, is where the translations will be put. Should they be new modules? Or should they hang out with the original module, say, at an address like "http://cnx.rice.edu/content/mNNNNN/es"? Also to consider is how revisions to the original will affect translations.

In addition to my long-winded discussion, there is some interesting discussion at Creative Commons about these issues, but much of it is about a potential translation license that they might implement, which I think might be irrelavent to us, because it seems mostly intended for authors who might be reluctant to give up so many rights, but might not mind translations. Since all our authors already agree to the attribution license, that shouldn't be an issue.

Ok, sorry I wrote so much, but I wanted to throw it out on the table.