[Foundation-l] Push translation

[Mark Williamson]

On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 11:03 PM, Casey Brown <lists at caseybrown.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 1:39 AM, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Wikipedias are not for _cultures_, they are for languages. If I and
>
> I'm surprised to hear that coming from someone who I thought to be a
> student of languages.  I think you might want to read an
> article from today's Wall Street Journal, about how language
> influences culture (and, one would extrapolate, Wikipedia articles).
> <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383131592767868.html>

Casey, that's nothing new, nor is it anything I was unaware of. The
debate about whether language influences thought (or vice versa) has
long been a debate within the scholarly community. Please see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity for a more detailed
treatment of the subject - there's still no consensus.

Nobody's arguing here that language and culture have no relationship.
What I'm saying is that language does not equal culture. Many people
speak French who are not part of the culture of France, for example
the cities of Libreville and Abidjan in Africa. Many (many!) people
who speak English are not part of the culture of England (or even the
rest of the UK, the United States, Canada, Australia or New Zealand),
including hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of native speakers.

Languages are certainly cultural artifacts, but that does not mean
that they are equivalent. Imagine tomorrow morning everybody in Japan
spoke French and only French and that all Japanese literature and text
suddenly was printed only in French. Would Japanese culture cease to
exist? Not at all. The customs, attitudes, rituals, beliefs and even
the food would not be changed (attitudes is debatable perhaps, but I'm
not a believer of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). Yes, something great
would be lost, an irreplaceable _part_ of the Japanese culture, but
cultures have sometimes persisted in spite language death. Ritual
prayers are sometimes translated to the new language, other times
fossilized in a language now rendered incomprehensible by time, same
goes for geographic and personal names...

I think it's pretty clear at this point that, for example, all 4 of
the regular users of ace.wp are offended by certain images on en.wp. I
don't think it would be a stretch to say that many - probably the vast
majority - of Acehnese speakers would find those images similarly
offensive. Now let's say I've got a toddler and he has an Acehnese
caretaker. This caretaker is monolingual in Acehnese, but they've been
expressly forbidden from mentioning religion.

When this toddler grows up, he'll probably be good enough at Acehnese
and have spoken it early enough in life to be considered a native
speaker... but will he automatically have any inclinations one way or
another about the pictures? Of course not. So, just because the vast
majority of speakers of a language share a cultural background does
NOT mean that the language could only ever be spoken by people who
belong to that culture. Wikipedia versions are very clearly for
languages. the Estonian Wikipedia is the Wikipedia in the Estonian
language, not the Wikipedia for Estonian Culture.

As an example of this, I have a good friend who grew up speaking Akan,
having had a nanny from West Africa. Is my friend a member of the Akan
culture? Not really... does that mean she couldn't be a productive
member of the Akan Wikipedia (if she wanted to be :-( )? No.

If Wikipedias were for cultures, the edits of Macedonians, Chinese,
Italians or Congolese people to en.wp would be somehow less valid that
those of native speakers of English in predominantly Anglophone
societies. Of course, this is not the case.

That's one of the things I like about en.wp - the fact that people who
do not speak English as their primary language form a large portion of
our editors means that things are likely to come out a bit more
balanced. Argentine editors can edit [[Falkland Islands]], for
example. In my humble opinion, this is the way it should be. Language
is a troublesome barrier. Who is to ensure that Turkish or Greek
articles about Cyprus are neutral? I'm not an advocate of a one-world
language, but if we had perfect MT tech, I would be in favor of
everybody collaborating on one massive international WP.

>> 1,000 other Americans suddenly learnt French (to the point of
>> native-level fluency) and decided to read and edit the French
>> Wikipedia, it would "belong" to us just as much as to anybody else.
>> This came up recently in the debate about the Acehnese Wikipedia. Some
>> people said that all Acehnese were Muslim (not true - there is a small
>> community of Acehnese Christians). They said that if anyone is
>> Christian, they'd be ejected from Acehnese society and therefore no
>> longer Acehnese. However, they'd not stop speaking the Acehnese
>> language.
>>
>> Nobody claims the English WP is for US/Commonwealth cultures only...
>> this is reasonable when a Wiki is tiny, but as it grows large it's
>> important that NPOV mean "neutral point of view for EVERYBODY", not
>> just "a point of view that everybody in OUR country can agree upon",
>> etc.
>>
>
> No one suggested that it was about "a point of view that everyone in OUR
> country can agree upon".  No one's suggesting that anyone "owns" a
> wiki or that you're not welcome to contribute.  It's just that
> different wikis/languages are different and have different articles.
> Some focus on different topics based on what they usually do, some try
> to tackle the subject scholarly, some probably don't focus on blame
> (see the article's commentary on Japanese/Spanish views of accidental
> events), etc.

I'll ignore your "probably" here for the time being. However, I don't
see any good reason that different Wikis need to have different
contents. Different communities have agreed on different policies,
articles are allowed on en.wp that would be speedily deleted on de.wp,
but these policies are not necessarily based on some intrinsic aspect
of the language, but rather the opinions of the people who make up
that particular community. Please, please, please note that I am not
saying everybody should follow the same policy, I'm just saying that
policy differences or differences in article content are not a result
of some sort of intrinsic property of the language in which they are
written. A _good_ translation of any _good_ article from any language
into any other language should be perfectly acceptable, with
allowances for local policy differences (which again are set by the
Wiki community, NOT by every single speaker of that language).

-m.