On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 20:31, Michael Snow wikipedia@frontier.com wrote:
On 7/29/2011 11:06 AM, Wjhonson wrote:
Yes of course translating documents "has been practiced in academia for a very long time."
We however are not a first publisher of translations. We are an aggregator of sources. That is the point of RS. We don't publish first.
Translating a quotation from a foreign-language source in a Wikipedia article is functionally no different from translating the contents of a Wikipedia article in one language to create an equivalent Wikipedia article in a different language.
That's, actually, different. Encyclopedic text is our work; or, if we talk in the sense of OR, our own OR, no matter if it's been written originally or translated. So, when you translate an article from one language to another, you do that as encyclopedist, not as researcher.
In other words, if you miss something in encyclopedic text, that would affect just encyclopedic text itself. If you claim that you've translated the source, that affects validity of the source itself.