Wikinovel attempt

28 May 2009 at 3:45 AM | Posted in News | 6 Comments

Multilingual writers keep trying to join the Web 2.0 generation, though so far unfortunately with not consistently sterling success. Witness this candid admission by a group of such writers:

“Seeing how few collaborative multilingual literary projects exist in any form, this [disappointing] result is not particularly surprising. The Congress moved towards a similar goal but language exchange in conversation about shared texts is a bit less daunting than collaborative multilingual literary creation. No doubt, as automated translation becomes better and as interaction increases across linguistic boundaries in the world of electronic literature, more interlaced multilingual works will be possible.”

In fact, despite the “failure” of this particular 2006 project, the idea of a wikinovel is an excellent one, since the Web offers writers from various linguistic traditions a way to work together without having to pay enormous airfares and hotel bills or getting a grant from usually fairly conservative writing retreats. I hope the writers of the Wikinovela: a project of hypertextual, collaborative, and multilingual creation on the Internet will come together again in virtual space to create their second work.