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