On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 3:27 PM, Amir E. Aharoni
<amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
A UN-like model, with several major languages, into
which important
Foundation releases *must* be translated, is a realistic solution that
will enable more people to read them. This, however, also poses the
danger of perpetuating current linguistic conflicts. For example,
translating the WMF blog into Chinese will allow a lot of people who
know Chinese, but not English, read it, but it will yet again put
Chinese above the regional languages of China; the same can be said
about Russian, Spanish, French, Indonesian and other major languages.
Nevertheless, done properly, it's better than staying English-only.
This is a very interesting idea. (My last post was mostly directed at
the original poster's comments about us rejecting multilingualism, not
your proposal. Sorry if I didn't make that clear!)
I don't know if we should necessarily say that they "*must* be
translated" into those languages, since we are volunteer-driven, but
this could be more of a coordinator-thing... like we need to make sure
that we keep volunteers on-hand and supported who speak these
languages. If we see a gap in a certain language, we'll try to
replace that person ASAP. We might want to try to revive translation
teams, and make sure that we always have a well-staffed translation
team with members ready to translate into these big languages.
Anyway, I would love to have people working to make an updated
priority list that they think we should use. :-) The metrics that
Mark suggests are a great idea. Number of speakers, number of
monolingual (or native) speakers, and size of the editing community
would be great things to consider.
--
Casey Brown
Cbrown1023