Utilisateur:Arria Belli/Questionnaire en/Wpedzich

I have been a Wikimedian since December 2006. I started seriously on Polish Wikipedia, where I translated en:HotBot - that was my very first edit (although I learned about wiki language using English Wikiquotes and made about 5 or 6 edits formatting the Polish proverbs page there). And I have been translating ever since - I do not remember an edit in the mainspace which wasn't either a vandalism revert or a translation.

The languages I work with are English and Polish, both ways. Just these two, since my German is too poor to think about translating into/from it. I generally add very little, if any, information to my translations - I leave my sandboxes open to anyone who wishes to add something after I finish the translation process. I rarely correct bugs in the source text.

While choosing the articles, I mainy follow my own interests (willing to specialise in IT texts I usually select one of these) although I leave the IT world when a translation is suggested to me by fellow Wikipedians - be it new Wikipedia rules, or articles that are supposed to be displayed in the "Did you know" section.

While translating I do not work at specific time intervals or frequency - till now all depended on my work (a language instructor does not work 9-to-5) and baby Nicky. I can do 10 pages in a day, or leave the article for half a week. I normally concentrate on one text at a time and 90% of my effort is for Polish Wikipedia - the rest is Meta, PL Wikinews and some "loose ends" such as Translatewiki.

I use my own sandbox for translations, although I do not say "boo" when someone edits it. I'd say I like it when a text has as much a limited number of editors as possible, especially to keep the terminology homogenuous.

Although I have been trained as a language instructor, I have been quite active as a "real-life" translator as well, usually doing one-time jobs - a contract here, a security procedure there, a manual somewhere else. Right now I'm getting more involved and want to make this activity my primary source of income.

I think that my translation job on Wikipedia is of at least acceptable quality - I have been one of the main editors of 2 featured articles on pl.wikipedia (plus one that didn't make it into an FA) and a few that got into the "Did you know" section. I was also one of three translators that prepared the Polish version of English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee rules - so there were rather "big caliber" texts, which have been and still are actively used with maybe minor changes. The rest of the community seems to accept the topics I choose to cover as well as the quality of the output.

So far, I haven't come across criticism on the grounds of "foreign sources only".

I have never worked with image translations.

I quite like the way translations are handled, especially in more formal ways - in PLwiki the project used to be called "Translation of the month" while now the community works on a few texts simultaneously.