I too am not a lawyer, however, having been involved with a lot of nonprofit governance, I
think that for these purposes, in other languages, yes - "Board of Trustees” and
“Board of Directors” are basically interchangeable. The selection of words is usually a
stylistic or homage based reason more than a legal distinction. That is not always the
case, and when available, I recommend using “Board of Trustees” - but if there’s a
language issue presented by this, I think "Board of Directors" is a reasonable
substitute to base a translation on. Again, I say that not being with Legal and not as an
official WMF recommendation, just my own personal two cents. :)
-greg
On Jan 26, 2017, at 3:07 PM, Guillaume Paumier
<gpaumier(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hello,
2017-01-26 9:38 GMT-08:00 Lena Traer <ltraer(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
Would you say that the Board of Trustees at WMF has the same role as the
traditional Board of Directors? If that is the case, "Conseil
d'administration" likely is most appropriate translation.
In Russian, the "board" is also translated as "council". However,
"Board of
Directors" and "Board of Trustees" translate slightly differently. I
think
non-profit organizations are likely to use "Board of Trustees" whereas
for-profit corporations use "Board of Directors".
I'm not very familiar with the legal intricacies of the different
kinds of Boards. To be completely accurate, the best term would
probably be the English one ("Board of Trustees"), simply because it
has an official definition in a specific geography and doesn't have an
exact equivalent in other locales. But for the reasons given by
Matthieu, it's generally better to try and find the closest
approximation.
In France, both non-profit organizations and for-profit organizations
can have a "Conseil d'administration". It's also the French phrase
we've been using on the Foundation's website since 2004 (although the
page hasn't been kept up-to-date with changes in Board members
recently):
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Conseil_d%27administration
Hope this helps :)
--
Guillaume Paumier
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