Ray Saintonge wrote:
Your message contains a very important subtlety. If I could translate this text into Cree the result would not be in Cree; it would be in English with Cree words. There exists a pervasively naïve and simplistic view about translations that it is just a matter of changing words that have a one to one correspondence. Some topics, notably technical ones, can survive that transition very well, but topics that are closely linked to culture fare rather badly.
While that's certainly true, I think the various Wikipedias can still benefit from translation of a sort. A word-for-word translation is likely not desirable in all cases for the reasons you mentioned, but moving the information itself across is very useful. For example, all the factual information from a German-language biography is directly applicable to an English-language biography; it just needs to be written into such an article by an English speaker who understands enough German to pull the relevant facts out of the original.
-Mark