Actually, I think a translation that equals "financial reserve" is as good as can possibly be expected considering the circumstances. Any candidate who uses many words and/or concepts that the average native English speaker does not know well enough to give a somewhat decent explanation of, will when translated yield some half-good and some outright wrong stuff. That is IMHO natural, especially since we are in most cases not talking about professional translators - but even in printed books one often can find the most amusing translation mistakes. I expect the result of the translations to various languages to vary. Work load also plays a part in how refined translations will become.
As Alphaia pointed out, puns and many types of jokes are typically impossible to translate. One has to make up a new joke - not recommended in this context - or leave it out. Some of the statements had words in them linked to the corresponding articles on English Wikipedia. Some of those exist in Swedish, others do not. Linking to the sometimes small and sometimes bad articles on the subjects in Swedish Wikipedia was hardly the effect the author was searching for.Linking to articles in English in a text that is supposed to the Swedish translation really shows that the candidate only has the English-speaking voters in mind.
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? Well, that is what one does in a room where there are many non-native speakers so... maybe, although the thought is not entirely appealing. There are ways around it, though. Oscar very cleverly linked to Wikipedia articles in several different languages; it was obvious that I should let the links remain as they were., and there is no bad message to a user of any language.
I am sorry if it seems like I especially targeted Improv here. I was certainly not trying to do that! Several candidates used the word endowment, and his explanation on why he wanted to establish this endowment is what helped me the most in determening its meaning in context. Asking the candidates to explain things might be a good idea, I never thought of that. I regularly consulted - besides my dictionary plus the Wikipedias and Wiktionaries - my boyfriend, who is a native English speaker and interested in languages, the English speaking Wikipedia IRC channels (with varying result, for instance the people I spoke to in #wikimedia immediately thought of university colleges when they heard the word endowment; the context given did not make them change their mind), and #wiktionary (generally with better result than the wikipedia channels).
If you want to make a good impression on the non-English speakers, write a statement that can be translated. OTOH, since the English speakers are the majority of the voters I guess it does not make much of a difference for the outcome of the election. I don't suppose it will be possible to see how the voters from different projects voted? Not even the bigger ones?
/habj