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(a)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(a)gmail.com>om>:
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
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