Technology for Collaborating

Now that we have gotten a few pages translated, we are investigating the best way to facilitate multiple people contributing. Currently, we are exploring using Github, a site that is widely used for collaborating on software development, as a place to keep and track the translated text and to accept updates. Github also has a feature they call Pages that allows you to publish information as web pages.

Github pages supports Markdown, a simple way to format text that is also used in the Duolingo forums. into HTML, which should work for most of what we are doing. The exception is that Markdown (at least the Jekyll implementation) seems like it may not be adequate for more complex tables, and there are a lot of tables in the Caighdeán. We can hand-code HTML tables in order to make arbitrarily complex tables, but since we can’t expect all contributors to be able to do that, we’ve discussed using an intermediary format, e.g. spreadsheets, for recording the translations. In that way, we can separate translating Irish from coding in HTML, so interested contributors can do what they do best.

Translating the Caighdeán

As I have been learning Irish, I have wanted a grammar reference in English. There is a very nice Irish grammar reference by Lars Braesicke on the web at http://braesicke.de/gramadac.htm, unfortunately, it is in German, which I read, but not as well as I read English. (There is an English translation of Lars’ site, but it is not up to date, and he does not have access to update it.)

I have used the Caighdeán Oifigiúil, the official Irish language reference produced by the Irish government, but that is in Irish, and so any time I have to look something up, it means there will be the effort to translate it (which often requires several dictionaries) as well as the effort to understand what it is saying. The natural next step was to translate it to English as a reference so I didn’t have to translate on the fly when I wanted to use it.

From forum posts on the Duolingo Irish forum: https://forum.duolingo.com/topic/901, it seems that there are others who would also like an up-to-date Irish grammar reference in English, so I decided I would put this on the web (which has the benefit that Irish speakers who happen upon it can let me know if they have improvements).

I spent a good deal of effort (with the help of some other Duolingo moderators) looking into the copyright policy covering the Caighdeán to make sure I wouldn’t run afoul of the Irish government. That is a story in itself, which I may post in more detail in the future. I did determine to the best of my ability that translating it for public use appears to be allowable. I have posted the copyright information with links at https://caighdean.home.blog/copyright-information/ , and, naturally, if the Irish government gets in touch and tells me to take it down, I will do it without delay.

Copyright Information

This website contains material translated from the

Gramadach na Gaeilge, An Caighdeán Ofigiúil 
Published by the Houses of the Oireachtas
The original is available at the following website as of 22APR2019

https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/publications/?q=An%20Caighde%C3%A1n%20Oifigi%C3%BAil

It contains Irish Public Sector Information licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence

‘An Caighdeán Oifigiúil’ means the official standard of the Irish language, prepared by the Houses of the Oireachtas and published under Government copyright, to be used in primary and secondary legislation and as the guide for writing in the Irish language

http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2013/act/3/enacted/en/print

The Houses of the Oireachtas Copyright and Re-use Policy
can be found at:
https://www.dail100.ie/en/copyright/

The Oireachtas (Public Sector Information – Open Data) License
can be found at:
https://data.oireachtas.ie/ie/oireachtas/corporate/governanceAndReform/2016/2016-03-27_oireachtas-psi-licence-open-data_en.pdf