Being on a wikiholiday (really I *am* on holidays), digging a pile of mails when I was on another forced holiday, I reached to this mail (for your information: due to machine trouble, I had no access to the Net from 05/11/24 till a certain day of last December)
I agree generally with Elian and Delphine, while I am not sure if we can say in all cases English is the only valid version, even assuming it would be so in most cases. Among all proposed things, I support the part we need a policy for translation. I think we would do better works within a more shared and clarified scheme based on well-definied ideas.
I feel our activities for multilingal audience supported by many goodwill translators but I am not sure what kind of ideas we who is engaged in translation and/or coordination are now sharing and not. That is partly because I proposed to have an open meeting of translators.
If the Foundation, as an organisational body, expresses its ideas how the translation of its official statement is expected to work, for instance, I assume it would be helpful for both translators and coordinators. It could be a sort of mission statement rather than policy. Or not. Or we need both. I myself feel we need both - mission statement of translators as grand design and policy which would be considered in implementations/particular translating works.
I would like to know what you all - responsible people / translators / people of the community either English native or not - think about such necessity to have officially defined documents about translation/realisation of multilingualism.
On 11/30/05, Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com wrote:
Oooops. missing part of a sentence.
On 11/30/05, Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com wrote:
I like the idea, because I believe we need to pay more attention to those "cultural differences". And I am not for literal translations either, because...
...because those, as you pointed out, do not take into consideration concepts, ideas, core values that a language carries, and even sometimes possible interpretations due to the language that would change the meaning entirely.
However, where possible, I really think we should make the translations of policies as "official" as possible, especially for things as important as the privacy policy.
I would hate us to fall in the GFDL pit of having one unintelligible policy in English and arguing that it was the only valid one. For some languages (unfortunately not for all), we probably have enough people with the skills to make sure the policy has the same core meaning as the English one, that it takes into consideration the specificities of one language and/or culture. If it can be approved by the relevant people and made official, all the better. Creative Commons did it... if anyone else, I think *we* can do it too. ;-)
But still, I think your idea is a good one, and should be adopted widely.
Delphine
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