In the last few months i was deeply involved with several big translation projects for Wikimedia: The Fundraising, Sue's March Update letter, and the Editor's survey.

What's common to all of them is that the original English texts were written without keeping localization in mind, or maybe not keeping it in mind *enough*. I wouldn't ask for such a thing from a poet or a journalist, but i would expect it from a writer of a text that has a particular function - to raise money from various countries, to describe the state of a multilingual community, or to conduct a worldwide research - and about which it is known that it will be translated to dozens of very different languages, each with a culture behind it.

I can give several examples:

==Eternal September== Sue's letter links to the English Wikipedia article [[Eternal September]]. The fact that it's an English Wikipedia article is already a problem - for people who don't know English linking there is pointless.

But there's more to it. Since the letter was published, it was translated to several languages, and some translators also went the extra mile to create the [[Eternal September]] article in their respective Wikipedias. Until here, all good. Now, i don't know about other languages, but in the Hebrew Wikipedia such articles are sometimes proposed for deletion, because they are about "foreign expressions which are not used in Hebrew". I completely disagree with such reasoning and i created this article nevertheless, but the fact is that it happens and in addition to translating it could have had to jump through the hoops of a deletion discussion.

This is only one possible implication out of many that are imaginable. I'm not telling the future writers of letters to the community not to link to the English Wikipedia; i'm just telling them to keep in mind that it may involve more than they think it does.

==WikiLove, Twinkle and Huggle== Sue mentions the WikiLove gadget in her letter. To the best of my knowledge WikiLove only works in the English Wikipedia, but the letter invites all readers to use it. Believe it or not, some Wikipedias don't even have barnstars.

The survey mentions Twinkle and Huggle. These gadgets are also specific to the English Wikipedia. They were adapted to other projects, but not to all of them; for example, i couldn't find them in the very large French and Portuguese Wikipedias. Asking editors of these Wikipedias about Twinkle and Huggle is not just pointless, but patronizing, too.

(This gadget thing is a part of a larger issue: gadgets development is not coordinated, even though many of them could be useful to all projects.)

==Gender in the survey== I already wrote about this: Surveys tend to be long lists of questions in the second person. This is not a problem in English, but in some languages the second person is strongly gender-dependent. IIRC, the translations are supposed to be finished by today. If the survey would be announced earlier, the translators would have time to write a feminine version and developers would have time to think of modifying LimeSurvey to actually support it. (Actually i haven't completely given up on it yet.)

==Nationality in the survey== The survey asks about "Nationality". This term is not consistent even in English: it may mean the place of birth, the place of current citizenship, the genetic ethnic group, the national identity and other things. In Russian, my native language, the related word (национальность) refers *only* to the ethnic group. I happen to be aware of the ambiguity in English, so i bothered to ask about the precise meaning, but another translator - certainly, in good faith - translated it as "ethnic group" (i asked to correct it). And in the first place the survey should have been written as unambiguously as possible.

==Currencies in the Fundraising== In the Fundraising letters currencies were mentioned. These currencies are not relevant for the whole world.

==Repetition== Some texts are repetitive, for example whole sentences in the Fundraising letters and "choose all that apply" in the survey. But they aren't marked as such - they are just copied and pasted. MediaWiki has templates for that! Another thing that must be done to reduce repetitiveness is migrating to a proper translating platform instead of plain MediaWiki; see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28021 .

I have many more examples of such problems. Of course, i understand that a writer in English cannot think of everything in advance and i don't want to stifle the creativity of the writers; and i do believe that there is creativity behind this texts, even though they are more functional than artistic. All i'm asking is to think about these examples and to remember that a. texts had to be translated. b. translation has more implications than you initially imagine.

Thank you for understanding.

-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com "We're living in pieces,  I want to live in peace." - T. Moore