Just to clarify: The reason they wanted it as translated as possible is to make it easier for more, non English speaking, communities to participate in the election in their native language and understand what's happening.

James Alexander
Community Advocacy
Wikimedia Foundation
(415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur

On Sat, May 2, 2015 at 7:33 AM, James Alexander <jalexander@wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Sat, May 2, 2015 at 7:20 AM, Minata Hatsune <minatahatsune@gmail.com> wrote:
I am a translator working on Vietnamese language. I was surprised to see the translation in the two links above is done correctly (although I've edited a bit for more understandable). It's not like someone has used Google Translate or other machine translation tools.

The translator is https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Varnent. I am curious whether he also understands this language? Despite his personal page did not show it. I also have the same questions with the Vietnamese translation of Call for candidates. It was done by a staff of WMF (Azariv), and I don't think he could understand a strange language such as Vietnamese. I am active in many Wikimedia projects in Vietnamese, but had never seen him before.

Hi Minata,

The board had as one of it's goals this year to have as much translated as possible for the board and FDC Elections (especially the board elections) because of that they asked me to pay for some professional translations for some targeted languages (mostly popular languages in different areas of the world, my boss Philippe picked them earlier for the strategy consultation a couple months ago) and Vietnamese was one of them. 

To be honest I've found community members make the best translations (especially given that some words are Wikimedia specific) but given the large amount of text and the short time schedule the elections have we wanted to ensure we'd get some translations in on time and allow community members to do the quick fixes that make it more understandable and that much better. Both Alex (Azariv) and Varnent were plugging those paid translations in.

James Alexander
Community Advocacy
Wikimedia Foundation