The Translators without Borders Workspace powered by ProZ.com had reached its record of words processed in June 2012, when 577,315 words were posted by humanitarian organizations and later translated by our volunteers. This record was broken in January 2013 and then shattered in February 2012, when 603,659 and 873,735 words were posted respectively.
From January 2011 To February 2013, our volunteer translators have delivered 8 million words to humanitarian organizations. During the last 12 months our workspace processed 4.70 million words and delivered 4.35 million words. This represents increments of 22.3% and 17.0% respectively over the 12-months period reported in our last newsletter.
Translators
The team of professionals approved by Translators without Borders reached 1659 by the end of February, with a growth of 59 translators during the last 3 months.
While we still have excess capacity in English to Spanish, our most populated pair, the continuous growth in demand for translations put pressure on the need for new volunteers, especially in African and Indian languages.
Our top-five volunteers are: Edwin Miner, who has donated an amazing 133,015 words, followed Edgar Marie-HélèneCadieux (119,447 words), eric ragu (98,802 words), gail desautels (79,082 words), and Ashutosh Mitra (who translated 75,691 words from English to Hindi).
Language pairs
During the last 12 months our translators accepted volunteer assignments in 92 language pairs. Top language pair was English to French, representing 19.9% of the operation. The next three pairs were French to English (18.1%), English to Spanish (9.4%) and Spanish to English (4.3).
Overall, the language pairs beyond the top-4 represented 48.4% of the total, up from the 48.1% reported in the last newsletter. This number is important because it shows the degree of ‘linguistic spread’ of the operation, as we strive to move beyond the main European languages to those used by most people in need of translation help.
Clients
A total of 89 humanitarian organizations requested our services during the last 12 months.
At the top of the list is the Wikipedia project, launched this year with the Wikimedia Foundation to translate 100 critical medical Wikipedia articles into as many languages as possible (with a starting goal of 100 languages). The project is currently active into 38 languages and more than 130 translated articles are already live in the local versions of Wikipedia, and several others are already translated and await integration in Wikipedia.
Next in line come Médicos sin Fronteras from Spain, and then Acción contra el Hambre (also from Spain) and Action contre la Faim, two branches of the same humanitarian organization. Then comes Médecins Sans Frontières from Switzerland.