Hi Tomasz,
Thank you very much for everything you and the volunteers are doing. You people do rock.
WMF is getting professional translations in German, French, Spanish, and Japanese, and will post by Tuesday. We are doing this because of the fast timing situation and our desire to hear international voices. We are asking for translations by volunteers in the other languages. If the community says that we need to push out the dates, we will listen of course. My competing consideration is that we don't miss opportunities if the right course is to proceed forward as recommended in the blog post.
Apologies for any confusion here. Any fault is mine.
Again ... many thanks.
Geoff
*Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 03:19:55 +0200 From: "Tomasz W. Kozlowski" tomasz@twkozlowski.net To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] PRISM, government surveillance, and Wikimedia: Request for community feedback Message-ID: 51BBC13B.10809@twkozlowski.net Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Geoff, I'm a bit lost here now that I've read that translation notice more carefully — are you really saying you want to have this post translated into German, French, Spanish and Japanese by Tuesday, June 18, and then for the local communities to comment on it by Friday, June 21?
There is just no way that this can scale in this world.
FYI, I posted a message asking for translations at http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/translators-l/2013-June/002311.html, and I'm sure that our amazing volunteer translators can get it translated into those four languages (and more) by noon on Sunday (PST).*
(And again—doing this kind of things on a Friday is a Very Bad Idea[TM].)
-- Tomasz
Geoff Brigham wrote:
WMF is getting professional translations in German, French, Spanish, and Japanese, and will post by Tuesday.
I know that the RfC on PRISM has already been closed, but I have only remembered this today: what happened with the professional translations of https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/PRISM? As far as I can see, the German, French and Spanish translations have all been created (and then reviewed) by volunteers, and the Japanese version isn't finished to this day.
I'm asking this question now because I noticed that Garfield (Byrd) has spoken about the translation of the Annual Plan into other languages in the current issue of the English Wikipedia Singpost, saying: "I am hoping that some key parts of the annual plan can be translated and the Foundation is prepared to commit resources to this task."
I understand that it is the prerogative of the Foundation to decide how they want to spend their budget, but seeing how (seemingly) badly the translation of the relative short announcement on PRISM has been managed, I'm not really convinced that getting professional translations of the Annual Plan is that good an idea.
Our caring and motivated translation community has proven many times in the past that they can provide good quality translations of even the most important content; after long years of waiting, we now can use wonderful software (the Translate extension) that makes the job smooth and easy, so I'd just like us to give the volunteers a try before spending huge amounts of money on translating stuff.
Tomasz
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org