Thanks, Guillaume! I'm glad that Mathieu raised these question. We (WMF) have to be sensitive and careful with our wording with respect to translations. Being an international organization I would be happy to see us always use a standard set of defined terms, short sentences and standard grammar, which is much more difficult than expected. And sadly I know exactly what I’m talking about. Thanks for raising awareness again!
Alice.
Am 25.01.2017 um 18:02 schrieb Guillaume Paumier gpaumier@wikimedia.org:
Hi,
2017-01-25 8:47 GMT-08:00 mathieu stumpf guntz psychoslave@culture-libre.org:
Well, I have a similar difficulty to interpret this message: "2016 Wikimedia Foundation Leadership Team Retreat"
In this case, it's "a retreat of the leadership team of the Wikimedia Foundation that happened in 2016". The "leadership team" usually means the C-level staff.
I would be curious to know if other translators feel sometime blocked when they meet such a long juxtaposed words and if they have some tricks to get around this difficulty.
Also is there somewhere where we could feedback a need for formulation using more prepositions in official documents published by WMF? I don't know if it would feel more "pedantic" or "uncommon" for most English natives, but surely it might help – at least me – in translation.
I've added a note to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/Manual#Guidelines because that's the only place I know that includes that kind of recommendations. Feel free to add it to other places.
-- Guillaume Paumier
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