It has been revealed by The Guardian that an American teenager has been found to have erroneously translated huge swathes of Scots Wikipedia, the Scots language version of the well-known website. Almost half of the entries on the site were made by the non-Scots speaking teenager who says he is “devasted” after being accused of “cultural vandalism”.
The 19-year-old from North Carolina, who doesn’t speak a word of Scots, edited the site under the username ‘AmaryllisGardner’, believing he was “doing good”.
He began editing and adding to the site at age 12 and over the last seven years has created or edited 49% of all articles on Scots Wikipedia according to one of the admins on the site. They suggested that as there was no one who “stepped up” to offer guidance on translation or article content, the resulting mistranslations and poor linguistic quality should have been expected.
Many of the entries made by ‘AmaryllisGardner’ simply implanted the occasional Scot’s word within an English grammatical construction, inadvertently lending more weight to the argument that Scots is not a language in its own right.
The flawed translations on the site highlight the importance of a solid grasp of a language, its grammatical rules and composition.
Unfortunately, AmaryllisGardener’ s contributions were littered with errors which other users tried to correct, but as he was an Admin on the site, he was able to undo the corrections and revert to his original mistranslation.
The extent of the mistranslations and errors have led some to call for the entire Scots Wikipedia to be deleted but Michael Dempster, director of the Scots Language Centre based in Perth, is considering possible options for the site, in conjunction with the Wikimedia Foundation, and believes it may be worth re-editing the American teenager’s contributions.
Dempster, a native Scots language speaker, said “We know that this kid has put in an incredible amount of work, and he has created an editable infrastructure. It’s a great resource but it needs people who are literate in Scots to edit it now. It has the potential to be a great online focus for the language in the future.”
He is now looking for a team of volunteers who can help with the immense task of re-editing and offers a free, online introductory course to Scots language learning in the hope that people who wish to help correct the translation errors can be better informed from now on.
The director of programmes and evaluation at Wikimedia UK, Daria Cybulska, told the Guardian that Wikimedia don’t own or control the Scots language Wikipedia but said they “are aware of the concerns that have emerged about the content of the Scots-language Wikipedia and are in touch with the Wikimedia Foundation and volunteer editor community to offer support in helping to ensure that these issues are addressed.”
Their initiatives for support include help with training for newcomers, organising editing events to promote interest and enabling partnerships with leading language organisations.
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