The Open Library of the Humanities has announced Annotran, an open-source translation tool based on the Hypothes.is web annotation tool. Just as hypothes.is allows users to collaboratively annotate the web, Annotran will facilitate collaborative translation of webpages.
Annotran was developed by Marija Katic and Martin Paul Eve in the Centre for Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London, and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
In an announcement on the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) site, Eve explains:
If you are a monolingual reader, much scholarly material may be inaccessible in your first language. By building technologies that allow people to translate between themselves, we make the first step towards a fresh scholarly communications paradigm that focuses on communication, rather than just on accreditation.
The software code is freely available on GitHub, and a demonstration video is available on Vimeo.
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