On 04/02/14 05:17, O'Donnell, Dan wrote:
model for recently with our essay competition. As I have just written, the real surprise of the essay competition (and I'd say GO::DH more generally) is the discovery that there's no reason not to say "submit in any language you want." It is simply not that hard to adjudicate multilingually. Indeed, I was amazed how easy it was.
I agree with this and think all such competitions should say this. I've tried to highlight that with DH Awards, but evidently need to do so even more if we run it again. For the very minimal criteria of nominations for DH Awards ("DH?", "Category?", "Date?") even the awful Google Translate was enough for someone like me to ascertain that some entries were perfectly acceptable or not. With an international nominations committee http://dhawards.org/dhawards2013/committee/ we have about 7 or 8 languages on the committee which helps, but would use Google Translate or approach those we knew spoke the language of any controversial nomination. This is a lot different from an essay competition of course, where the person reviewing it needs much more in-depth understanding.
I'd say our experience says you can run open language competitions relatively easily.
Although I may be sounding defensive (if so I apologise), I would definitely be interested in suggestions from GO:DH about how to encourage even more non-English nominations. Getting the call for nominations translated into even more languages I guess would be the first step. Other suggestions appreciated.
Best, -James