Most office hours are understandably in English, but I for one would be interested in supporting language diversity in our office hours.
I believe that at least three WMF employees in the Grantmaking Department speak some Spanish, and Spanish is spoken by a large percentage of the "global south", so I am wondering if there would be interest in having a bilingual Grantmaking office hour in English and Spanish. If there is interest in adding a third language to the mix I would suggest French due to the acclaim given to Wikimedia France in their most recent review from the Funds Dissemination Committee, with the hope that other thematic organizations can learn from Wikimedia France's experience.
Similarly, due to the substantial number of technical contributors to the Wikimedia projects who speak German, I am wondering if there would be interest in an explicitly bilingual German and English office hour for the Product and Engineering Department or for Wikidata. I would also suggest that Indic languages could be valuable for a Product and Engineering office hour, due to my unscientific perception that there is substantial interest in Language Engineering from Wikimedians who speak Indic languages.
Pine
How do you envision the bilingual office hours to be set up? Should there be someone who translates everything that is being said? It seems to me that having office hours in simply a different language than English, if enough informed staffers are able to speak it, would be more feasible. Am 04.08.2014 21:39 schrieb "Pine W" wiki.pine@gmail.com:
Most office hours are understandably in English, but I for one would be interested in supporting language diversity in our office hours.
I believe that at least three WMF employees in the Grantmaking Department speak some Spanish, and Spanish is spoken by a large percentage of the "global south", so I am wondering if there would be interest in having a bilingual Grantmaking office hour in English and Spanish. If there is interest in adding a third language to the mix I would suggest French due to the acclaim given to Wikimedia France in their most recent review from the Funds Dissemination Committee, with the hope that other thematic organizations can learn from Wikimedia France's experience.
Similarly, due to the substantial number of technical contributors to the Wikimedia projects who speak German, I am wondering if there would be interest in an explicitly bilingual German and English office hour for the Product and Engineering Department or for Wikidata. I would also suggest that Indic languages could be valuable for a Product and Engineering office hour, due to my unscientific perception that there is substantial interest in Language Engineering from Wikimedians who speak Indic languages.
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Google Translate is adequate for imperfect but understandable Spanish and French translations into English, so anyone who needed live interpretation or post-meeting translation of Spanish or French into English could use Google Translate.
I don't know how feasible it is to use Google Translate for Indic languages or German.
I think it's important to maximize the accessibility of meetings for participants as well as readers of the chat logs so it may be that all chat logs of these office hours should be translated by WMF staff into English, with the original and English translations to be posted on Meta.
We could experiment with different language formats for office hours. I would leave that to the judgment of WMF and the level of interest expressed by Wikimedians who struggle with English and would prefer to communicate in a different language.
Pine
On Mon, Aug 4, 2014 at 12:59 PM, MF-Warburg mfwarburg@googlemail.com wrote:
How do you envision the bilingual office hours to be set up? Should there be someone who translates everything that is being said? It seems to me that having office hours in simply a different language than English, if enough informed staffers are able to speak it, would be more feasible. Am 04.08.2014 21:39 schrieb "Pine W" wiki.pine@gmail.com:
Most office hours are understandably in English, but I for one would be interested in supporting language diversity in our office hours.
I believe that at least three WMF employees in the Grantmaking Department speak some Spanish, and Spanish is spoken by a large percentage of the "global south", so I am wondering if there would be interest in having a bilingual Grantmaking office hour in English and Spanish. If there is interest in adding a third language to the mix I would suggest French due to the acclaim given to Wikimedia France in their most recent review from the Funds Dissemination Committee, with the hope that other thematic organizations can learn from Wikimedia France's experience.
Similarly, due to the substantial number of technical contributors to the Wikimedia projects who speak German, I am wondering if there would be interest in an explicitly bilingual German and English office hour for
the
Product and Engineering Department or for Wikidata. I would also suggest that Indic languages could be valuable for a Product and Engineering
office
hour, due to my unscientific perception that there is substantial
interest
in Language Engineering from Wikimedians who speak Indic languages.
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