Exploring Translators' Expectations of Wikipedia: A Qualitative Review

We approach Wikipedia as a technology integrated in a social network surrounding the translation process. In that network, interactions take place between translators and Wikipedia. This paper's goal is to explore potential uses that translators could expect from Wikipedia. We have based our interpretative and qualitative work on a review of the state-of-the-art literature dealing with Wikipedia in several disciplines. We have related Wikipedia's epistemology to the tools categorization proposed by Austermühl (2001) according to the translation process described by Holmes (1988). We have concluded that translators might use Wikipedia expecting to find linguistic, semantic, terminological, lexicographic and cultural information.