Collaborative translation for academia

[Benjamin Geer]

It would be very useful if open-access academic books and journals could be translated using collaborative translation. In order to make this feasible, it would have to be possible to break up each text into small chunks, so that a translator could just translate one chunk, or as much as he or she had time for, and others could do the rest bit by bit. Also, there would have to be a built-in review and approval mechanism, so that a responsible translator could check contributed translations and only publish the accurate ones. Translating web sites without the original author's knowledge or permission is OK for some types of sites, but not for academic publication, in which the original publisher needs control over the translations.