On 11/17/06, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
The more I ponder this statement the more I dislike it. Forget dissemination -- what about knowledge collection? As if knowledge only exists in English, or major European languages. The "language barrier" goes both ways. To access some of the world's oldest and most classic texts, we should also advocate teaching everyone classical Chinese. How likely is that? The gift of accessing information in your native language should not be underestimated by those who are lucky enough to take it for granted.
Well said! Once I was interviewed by Nick Hill, I stressed this point - that is why I am involved into project: thinking in your native language is, even if it seemed to be strange for the majority, *a genuine privilege*. Most of languages on this planet have such advantages in occasion to be initiated into the intellectual world. Besides some languages which lack writing system, there are thousands of people whose governments don't provide the educational opportunity in their native languages. If you are educated only in your mother tongue, you are highly privileged. And personally I think it is unfair: we human being is equally invited to heir the wealth of human beings? But I find no equal opportunity in this situation.
You may remember the thread "why Indian editors are not interested in their native language projects". One of answers is here; in India as same as other countries, middle and high education is provided mainly in English. High educated people are familiar to think in English. And English is even one of their government official language. It is not their mother tongue though, but they can claim English is one of India languages. But OTOH it is still no their mother language.
The principle of multilinguality is what really gives Wikimedia *global* participation and therefore WMF a global voice and global influence. That is something amazing that I am not really aware of anyone else... anywhere... doing on the same scale. It deserves proper recognition -- I think the "in their own language" should be re-appended.
So principally I think we share a same stance, Brianna. On the other hand I am a bit hesitant to add "in their own language" as the way once proposed. Because of their current situations - most of those language lack terminology to describe highly developed knowledge for example - it wouldn't go straightly I am afraid. We need coinage perhaps but ... well, is it really our tasks? To create enormous vocabulary for resources we would like to provide? I am not sure and at a corner of my brain a motto "avoid original researches" is blinking ...
Another case is the case of bi/multilingual. We also see an example on Indian language projects and Indian editors ... "Their own languages" don't meant their native languages exclusively in that case.
I would therefore like to retain a mention to our favor to multilingualism basically and in a modest way. Like "to help people having knowledge in their (own?) languages as far as they want". For example, an Ainu native who is basically educated in a Japanese educational system, I suppose, would prefer to read something, eh, for instance about financing, or in some cases about their own ethnic culture, in Japanese, not in their language. However, with such complication, I still agree it will be far great to mention to promotion of multilingualism in a certain way. I would appreciate people/person who proposed it on Frankfurter retreat.