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1. What is TranslApril?
2. How to Participate

[top]What is TranslApril?

TranslApril is a month-long translation relay, in the style of late 90s to early 2000s web translators.

For best understanding of this event's inspiration, a short story for you:

Once upon a time, on the web back in the late 90s and early 2000s, there was a storm of delightful dysfunction provided by an online translation service known as Babel Fish, provided by AltaVista (this is not a plug for companies that are irrelevant). Babel Fish was horrifically inaccurate and was only remotely useful as a translation service if the phrases plugged into it were short, simple, and literal - what could be expected, it was the 90s? There wasn't much better machine translation. The joy was the mangled translations it spit out, horrific transmogrifications of perfectly understandable language with little grammatical or semantic sense. (If you're curious, Babel Fish is still terrible, try it out here.)

With all of this in mind, welcome to TranslApril!

TranslApril is all about blindly translating, and the best way to do so on CWS is the copious usage of the gloss tag (<gl>).

The user @TranslApril Bot will be the primary mode of communication for TranslApril.

[top]How to Participate

Unlike Lexember or CoWriMo, TranslApril is an event that is designed to be silly and humorous instead of productive. There are no real goals, there are no requirements, though like all CWS events, there are ways to earn yourself some awards. Here are the basics:

• Join the TranslApril clan.
• TranslApril is broken into 5 three-day relays, with a three-day break in between each relay.
• Each relay will begin with a sentence in a conlang accompanied by a gloss. This seed will be hidden behind the <spoil></spoil> tags, so other users don't look at it accidentally and contaminate their translations.
• The first participant will translate the sentence as literally as possible, using only the gloss as a reference. Hide your translation using the <spoil></spoil> tags, and make sure to gloss your translation as meticulously as possible.
• Each following participant will then translate the replying sentences in turn, using only the glosses as reference, hiding their replies and glossing.
• Please, please use the <spoil></spoil> tags to hide your entire gloss so that users do not see all the glosses in the thread - when you want to translate, just hover over the latest post.
• At the end of the relay, the final translation will be translated into English and compared with the original sentence, also translated into English. We're hoping for some catastrophic translation travesties!
• Please do not add new threads to the main TranslApril board. Threads will automatically close as the relays end.