Open Badges Internationalisation

[Serge Ravet]

Is there a way or a plan to internationalise badges. Issuing multilingual badges would be most useful for Canada and Europe -and elsewhere I presume. Thx in advance for any piece of information.

[Laimonas Ragauskas]

Hi Serge, 

Here at Unique Learning Badges project, we have addressed this issue as we have partnership of  6 countries. We will be translating our website in 6 languages (English, Lithuanian, German, Slovenian, Spanish and Portuguese) in the upcoming weeks and the same should happen with the platform, where people could issue Open badges, create Quests etc. The way the translation function is programmed, allows our project community to create their own translation through simple user interface. I wonder if there would be an interest to integrate this functionality in the BadgeKit as all of what we do is coded in node.js

 

Thinking further in this line, I wonder if there could be some kind of translation "plugin" integrated in the future versions of Backpacks if for example an English speaking third-party would like to understand the content of Portuguese or Lithuanian Open badge. 

At the moment probably this could be done through various google translation browser plugins, but some kind of localization function would be great to think of (maybe a possible topic for future hackathons of Open badges) when Open badges descriptions could be shown in the language of user checking the Backpack of another person. 

Laimonas Ragauskas
www.learningbadges.eu

Laimonas Ragauskas
Mobile: +370-657-94041
E-mail: laim...@gmail.com  

On 2014 Kov. 19, at 22:35, Serge Ravet <serge...@gmail.com> wrote:

Is there a way or a plan to internationalise badges. Issuing multilingual badges would be most useful for Canada and Europe -and elsewhere I presume. Thx in advance for any piece of information.

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[Michael Bauer]

Serge,

The current standard does not include any possibilities for having
multi-language descriptions. We're thinking about this and currently will
be creating multiple badges for different languages.

If you are interested in this: Can you bring forward a proposal?

Michael

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[Serge Ravet]

Thanks Michael and Laimonas for your feedback,

I'm not very familiar with internationalisation (vdex, i18n etc.), but I believe that Wikipedia is a good example to follow. It does even more that internationalisation, it does localisation (the content of the articles is not the same in the different languages).

My suggestion for internationalising badges would be to store the criteria in a public registry, so when someone wants to know the content of a badge in another language (e.g. using the browser language), the query would look first for an existing translation in the repository; alternatively an automated translation could be provided. The translation should be possible post-facto, so someone with a badge delivered in French wouldn't need a second badge when adding it to a CV in Spanish. There is an issue with the quality control of the translation, but one could assume that a wikipedia-like social mechanism will work...

One of the problem I see with the current implementation of Open Badges is the fragmentation of the information relative to criteria: each issuer has its own records and, as far as I know, totally unstructured (no relationships across criteria).

Placing the criteria in public registry would kill two birds with one stone: internationalisation and the ability to share across institutions and services competency frameworks (cross-referenced) — not just badges can make good use of 'criteria.'

Serge

[Nate Otto]

That's an interesting idea, Serge, and it's definitely a noble goal. However, having some kind of centralized registry would undercut many of the benefits of the open decentralized structure of the system. It would take the delivery of meaning out of the hands of the issuer and earner, putting a potentially untrusted intermediary between them and the audience. I see a lot of risks with an approach like that.

Like in many other issues, a lot of the weight of accessing the value of badges rests on the shoulders of the earner. If I apply for a job and want to present badges as evidence of my qualifications, I have to explain to the potential employer myself what badges are and what the specific ones I have earned mean. Translating across a language barrier does add one more challenge to that pile, but I don't think it's a different sort of challenge.

That said, I'd love to hear more about localization best practices and have further discussion to support the global reach of issuers' badges.

Nate

[Serge Ravet]

Well Nate, it is not just a noble idea, but a very practical one. A registry doesn't have to be centralised, it should be networked, so an organisation could have it's own registry within a federation of registries.

If you take a standard like Common Core, it doesn't make sense that each badge issuer copy/paste the content of the common core standard into the many different badges they will issue. In doing so, one vital piece of information is lost: if badges where referring to a common core registry, that means that we could use the unique identifier (a pointer to the definition) to do many different things, like establishing a map of all the badges delivered in relation to a specific competency, but also many different maps of all the other data/services making reference to the same competency. Letting each institution copy/paste the common core standard into their many idiosyncratic databases will simply loose that information. Of course, within a federation of registries, an institution could decide to improve/rewrite/expand/restrict the CC standard.

As I am very much a proponent of the self-designed badges, I would include the badges themselves within that federation of registries. We could imagine a service identical to the Mozilla backpack that would act as a registry for individual, idiosyncratic criteria. In fact, we are not very far from it. Today, only issued badges are pushed into backpacks. Now imagine that, instead of pushing assigned badges, 'empty' badges were pushed into the backpack. This would be very close to a registry. Now, without changing anything we could 'interpret' the metadata relative to the issuer as the 'badge designer'.

I understand that a number of people are working on the federation of backpacks. Well, that wouldn't require much work to concurrently work on a federation of registries.

As you see, at no time things are taken away from the hands of the issuer and earner. We are just providing another opportunity to create more meaning.

IMO, we shouldn't worry about the translation itself, but simply create the conditions to make it possible. As for the trust issue, it is precisely what badges are great at: I'll never repeat enough that badges are foremost a criteria-evidence-based trust relationship. We could perfectly well use this trust relationship as evidence (or authorisation) for translation. Once again, this is not rocket science :-)

Serge

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[Sunny Lee]

I like the idea of the federation of registries idea, which sounds a lot like a federation of badge directory idea that has been previously floated. 

> Placing the criteria in public registry would kill two birds with one stone: internationalisation and the ability to share across institutions and services competency frameworks (cross-referenced) -- not just badges can make good use of 'criteria.'

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[Nate Otto]

Serge,

Thanks for clarifying and expanding! I think I better understand what you're imagining.

 I've been thinking one of the services running in a well-developed OBI ecosystem will inevitably be webcrawlers/spiders that each knows how to recognize badges and can harvest those "empty" badges into a database. And you're right that this kind of tool doesn't need to be centralized; there can be many versions, and if they were somehow federated, that would be a further bonus. A tool that collects (or allows upload) and monitors badgeclasses/criteria out on the web could help with a bunch of different "problems" in the ecosystem. What I was thinking of using it for was pathway development, but translation is a good idea too.

(If I were to build one of these, I'd make sure to try building a method where issuers could overrule community translations. I think the issuer and the earner should be the main people in charge of how the relationship the badge represents is presented to audiences)

An aside: Jess Klein brought up the issue of licensing of badges in January, with the idea that we could return to that conversation at a later point. I think there are some thorny intellectual property issues we're dancing on the edge of once we start talking about badges like this. Since this technology is at such an early state, it might be a good opportunity over the next year or so to think about licensing possibilities and best practices to get off to a good start when we start building ecosystem-wide tools like this. (Plenty of fair use arguments to make as well, but fair use/fair dealing isn't internationally consistent)

Nate

[Kerri Lemoie]

Hi All,

On sort of the lighter side of localization,  what do you think about establishing a library containing translations of common open badges terms & definitions that the community could share in our localization efforts? 

Thanks,

Kerri

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[Don Presant]

I guess a practical short term solution (for Canada anyway) is to simply issue two badges in parallel, one English, one French. This has the advantage of allowing for individualization of the visual design, including words used in the design. It would make sense to say "equivalent to" each other in the criteria, to avoid confusion or inflation.

But having a link to translation in the metadata would be useful for earners bridging language communities.

And, of course, adding more languages would make this a real mess.

I'm unclear from Laimonas' post whether the badges themselves are translatable, vs the site that supports them, or the language chosen to issue the badge in (ie issue a badge in English vs Lithuanian)

[Nate Otto]

As soon as the BA standards group finalizes and approves extensions, we could whip up a quick draft of a translation extension that would specify an alternate language and allow the issuer to embed translations of all the fields directly in the metadata. The backpack nor any other badge-aware application would be able to read it (yet), so perhaps you could let your earners select which language they would like to have as primary.

Implementation of this feature would be nontrivial compared to issuing two badges, but I think this is the sort of thing that could be a better long-term solution.

Nate

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[Luciano K.]

I want to contribute with the Brazilian-Portuguese tropicalization (translation, language, idiom) .

I recently learned how to generate/issue/manage badges but in Brazil we must have the presentation screens/pages in Brazilian-Portuguese.

Can you help me?

How can we benefit from it?

Regards.

Lucian K.

[Nicola Ghirardi]

Ii think it's a good solution.
It could be also interesting an evaluation of the proposed solutions of JSON-LD at chapter 6.9 of http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/PR-json-ld-20131105/
Nicola