On 9/24/06, habj sweetadelaide@gmail.com wrote:
As Alphaia pointed out, puns and many types of jokes are typically impossible to translate.
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If you make sure not to use too difficult words, and avoid jokes at all cost, and not even wikilink freely... you risk a bunch of pretty colourless statement, maybe. Do we want to rob those who speak good English of the possibilities to use the full scale of their language?
In my impression Angela Beesley has been always skillful to express her ideas in a natural, warming and quite clear even to EFL (English as foreign lang) speakers. It may be relevant to her experience of working for dyslexia children and skill of writing in Simple English. It may be not impossible to write fravored and simple statement, however, it suggests to require training and skills.
It is true for us to be concious of our own wording. I myself have been sometimes complainted of difficulties on my wording; too much rhethorical, pedantic etc. But it is worthy to try if we are interested in communicating with a broader audience.
One possible compensation for English native speakers may be submitting two versions. Normal one and simpler ones. Consider to write with around 3,000 word vocaburary (I admit it may sound shabby...), for example.
During Election, we have faced some challanges on communications. Translation and its difficulty, it is just a part of iceberg. For better future and sanity of our tirelessly expanding community, those challanges will be good to be described and exmained carefully as potential signs things we haven't been aware as total.