Why forbidding French ? Many of the minority languages selected are for
users that cannot understand English but would more likely read French
(notably in Africa, but also in Canada), and could translate from the
French base (or at least read the French version in case of ambiguity)
English is frequently a very ambiguous language (absence of orthographic
distinction of nouns vs. verbs, frequent ommission of prepositions, many
terms with multiple meanings, abuse of capitalization...). English is not
the only "lingua franca" of the world, you can safely add French, Spanish,
Russian, Arabic, Hindi and Chinese. But French, Spanish, Russian and
Chinese are... forbidden here!
In all the listed languages allowed, these are spoken by very small
communities with very few contributors on Wikimedia, and even less ones
that are translators: if you restrict them to be able to read and
understand English, you'll get almost no translation for many of these
languages where English is not a **major** secondary language.
Take an example: translating to Breton (Brezhoneg), not a lot translators
for this language, but almost all of them use French as their primary
language (Breton is almost always a secondary regional language understood
now by a minority in its native region), English is much less understood by
these translators and they would appreciate having a good quality French
version at least to check what they more or less attempt to read in English.
2017-04-12 19:12 GMT+02:00 Chris Koerner <ckoerner(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
Hello my multilingual friends,
I have a favor to ask. The Reading team at the foundation is getting ready
to start the second round of deployments for the Page Previews feature. We
are trying to reach as many communities as we can in their language.
Translating this message to the communities in this group would be very
helpful and much appreciated - both from me and the communities themselves!
:)
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:CKoerner_(WMF)/
Enable_Hovercards/Phase_1
As always, you're a beautiful person and I appreciate the help.
Yours,
Chris Koerner
Community Liaison - Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation
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