Open Hypermedia Systems Working Group
The translator - Scenario
| OHSWG | 1997.02.11 |
Open Hypermedia Systems Working Group
The translator - Scenario
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Most recent: 11 February 1998 (initial version)
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Idea for a scenario.
Author Adam is writing hypertext H. He is constructing a rich and meaningful web site in german, his native language. Since he feels that the world should be able to read his thoughts, he asks Trudie, a professional translator, to convert the Hypertext H into a new version H' written in english. The structure of the hypertext should be preserved.
Trudie is glad about the challenging assignment that allows her to dive into a new technology she has heard of but never actually participated in yet. Since Trudie is only working part time, she will have to spend some time to translate the entire H. She decides to start out with a copy Hc and is going to convert the components of Hc one by one. This means that in the migration phase readers will eventually end up at a document written in german.
Assuming that H has a fairly simple structure, Trudie starts with the top level documents and works her way down using a breadth first search approach. After her first working day she logs out of the system and goes home. The next day she is unsure where she left off and what algorithm she used to select the document. Therefore she ends up loading a lot of documents into her editor, that she already converted into english the day before. This problem gets more severe every day. After a week she is not sure any more if there are any documents left to translate.
She returns her work to Adam who is already waiting for it. When she describes her problem, he suggests translating the documents in the alphabetical order of their names the next time. This way a linear search will always get her to the first untranslated document eventually and once she arrives at the last document she knows she is done. Trudie is not really convinced that this will be more efficient. Adam's colleague Bob - who has some knowledge of computer science - suggest using a binary search to improve performance. T is confused and decides to stick to Adam's proposal and not discuss this matter any further with anyone but fellow translators or secretaries.
After the weekend Adam calls Trudie and asks her, why there aren't any META tags in her documents. He added descriptions and keywords to all his documents, so that they can be found more efficiently using his favourite web crawler. Trudie has never heard about META tags and has never seen any in the components of H. It turns out, that Adam has added them after he gave Trudie the copy Hc. Since neither Adam nor Trudie have programming skills, Trudie ends up reopening every document and inserting the descriptions and keywords manually. Actually she thinks an automatic merge would not really have given her more than a starting point anyway, since the inserted information had to be translated anyway.
While typing the descriptions she finds a couple of typographic and grammatical errors in Adam's META tags. She suspects that there are logical mistakes, too, but she doesn't dare interfere with Adam's work. When she returns the changed document H'meta she tells Adam that there might be some typos in his descriptions. She can't remember in which documents though. Since Adam is very busy, he decides to ignore it and wishes silently to himself, that there would have been a means for Trudie to inform him right away.
Adam's boss Mark heard about the hypertext H and H' and wants it to be available on the company's public access Web server. (So far it has only been available on the company wide intranet.) Adam feels flattered. However he suddenly is confronted with a new task.
The company policy has very strict rules about documents' layout. He therefore has to adapt all documents again. (Style sheets would have helped and this is not really a translation related problem.)
When H and H' are transfered to the company web server, furious calls keep coming in at Adam, complaining about dozens of broken links. Adam wonders what he did wrong. He was very careful about using relative links only in order to make his document transportable. It turns out that Trudie used the WebLine Platinium editor, which converted every link into an absolute URI. Knowing that she cannot program, Adam calls his friend the programmer Fred instead of Trudie. Fred hacks up a little perl-Skript that converts all the URIs.
Once this has been used Trudie calls in again, saying that she went over H' once more and found some errors. She has just uploaded the improved version. Adam sighs and calls Fred again.
Although complaints have somewhat decreased the phone is still pretty busy at Adam's office. After two hours he realizes, that the company Web Server is running on a different operating system than his local machine. Therefore case suddenly does matter in filenames and links. Since Fred is out of town, Adam converts all his links manually, even in Trudie's documents and prays to God, that she deleted her local copy of it.
During this process Adam realises, that some parts of H are really outdated by now. He feels that he probably should rewrite most of it. Thinking about the process that led him where he is he moves on to other tasks.
One day a new employee Charlie joins Adam's company. As an introduction she reads H' and finds it mostly puzzling. Since it is so inaccurate, she decides to rewrite it completely. After she did so, she suddenly gets tons of calls from furious users, complaining about the lack of a version in german. ("There used to be a version in both languages, you can't expect everybody to learn english, we have enough to do as it is...") Charlie feels immediate burnout and quits her job.
The problem is now relegated to Mark who assigns it to Adam. [start over]