The goal for this project is to create a Farsi version of PEOI and to deliver a full assortment of university level courses on line that are of interest to Farsi speaking people.

To accomplish this, a very minimum of six committed individuals is necessary to form a Farsi translation team. In that team there are several distinct responsibilities:
- one coordinator and tasks supervisor who must be an excellent communicator and mentor, and be available every day of the week an average of one hour; he/she must have an excellent understanding of how individual tasks are accomplished, and how the entire project is completed;
- four or five translators of completed courses, who will work directly on course chapters and test questions with PEOI procedures; an optimum of 10 hours per week;
- one or two translators of general text and procedure text; the workload and schedule are flexible; probably 10 hours per week would be optimum;
- there may be various graphs and images that may need to be modified, as well as audio and video files; one or two volunteers must be specialists in these types of file.

The bulk of the translation work is that of completed courses. At the end of 2004, there were five completed courses in accounting, economics and finance ready for translation. New courses are expected to be completed during 2005. To view the courses that are coming up for future translation go to "Courses" and change the Status to "Under construction".
The translation of course from English to Farsi is performed with the "Edit text" procedure in the "Authors" section. Guidelines for using the "Edit text" procedure appear at the bottom of its screen. The following is a summary of those guidelines.

Once in the "Edit text" procedure, change Language to "Farsi", then the course, chapter and section desired by clicking on "Section" button. A schedule appears on the bottom of the screen showing the chapters and sections completed by the various team translators.

The text of each chapter or section appears in the TEXTAREA in its HTML format and below as it is seen by students (except that links do not work there). Translators are asked to write the translation into the TEXTAREA without disturbing the HTML tags. When pasting text, please paste no more than a short paragraph at a time, and save each time. When all the changes in a file are completed, click on the button to "Notify work completed." Observe that the screen can be split between the English text and the corresponding text in Farsi, or the split screen can be suppressed. Each time a file is saved, it is placed in a temporary directory writing over the file that was previously there. If necessary, the original can be retrieved from the permanent directory.

Once the text of the chapters and sections has been translated, it is time to translate the test questions. This is accomplished with the "Edit questions" procedure located in the "Authors" section. Guidelines for using the procedure are somewhat similar to those for "Edit text", and are present at the bottom of the screen in the procedure.

Aside from translation of courses, there is a significant volume of general information that PEOI needs to have translated. This includes the pages of general explanation which are translated with the "Edit pages" procedure in the "Projects" section. In addition, there are automated email messages and procedures text files that can be translated, edited and corrected with the "Edit procedures" procedure also located in the "Projects" section.

All tasks can be carried out from home on your own computer and at your own time. Registration is necessary to have access to any of the above procedures. Volunteers can join in forum discussions of issues of common interest. Volunteer tranlators should register as translators, and make sure to join the Farsi translation team. Volunteers who do not deal with the course text, and who are not expected to interact with students, are invited to register as volunteer staff members.

After all the registration steps are completed, logging in on PEOI takes the volunteer to "My account" procedure where all the information and all the activities of a volunteer are reported. It is recommended to visit "Select my tasks", and choose the task you want to perform so that everyone in the team is aware of what other members are doing.

Experience with other language teams suggests that it may take a couple of months to recruit the needed team. Once there are enough volunteers in the team, work can start on the pages of general text and procedure text. Such work may require about half a year, at which time links to the Farsi version of PEOI will be set up in the other languages. Translating completed courses may take a couple of years. Thereafter, depending on the volunteers present in the team, the Farsi team may want to seek new course authors in Farsi, and develop courses and an image that is more identifiable with the needs and culture of the region.

To see the registered translators of the Farsi team, use the Authors list in "Authors" section (note that you must be registered and logged in to make full use of the procedure), or use the group listing in the forum procedure.

To ask questions, and to offer your comments, criticism or suggestion, please mailto:peoi@peoi.org .