[Foundation-l] How to develop policy in a multilingual organization

[Aphaia]

Being on a wikiholiday (really I *am* on holidays), digging a pile of
mails when I was on another forced holiday, I reached to this mail
(for your information: due to machine trouble, I had no access to the
Net from 05/11/24 till a certain day of last December)

I agree generally with Elian and Delphine, while I am not sure if we
can say in all cases English is the only valid version, even assuming
it would be so in most cases. Among all proposed things, I support the
part we need a policy for translation. I think we would do better
works within a more shared and clarified scheme based on well-definied
ideas.

I feel our activities for multilingal audience supported by many
goodwill translators but I am not sure what kind of ideas we who is
engaged in translation and/or coordination are now sharing and not.
That is partly because I proposed to have an open meeting of
translators.

If the Foundation, as an organisational body, expresses its ideas how
the translation of its official statement is expected to work, for
instance, I assume it would be helpful for both translators and
coordinators. It could be a sort of mission statement rather than
policy. Or not. Or we need both. I myself feel we need both - mission
statement of translators as grand design and policy which would be
considered in implementations/particular translating works.

I would like to know what you all - responsible people / translators /
people of the community either English native or not - think about
such necessity to have officially defined documents about
translation/realisation of multilingualism.

On 11/30/05, Delphine Ménard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
> Oooops. missing part of a sentence.
>
> On 11/30/05, Delphine Ménard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I like the idea, because I believe we need to pay more attention to
> > those "cultural differences". And I am not for literal translations
> > either, because...
>
> ...because those, as you pointed out, do not take into consideration
> concepts, ideas, core values that a language carries, and even
> sometimes possible interpretations due to the language that would
> change the meaning entirely.
>
> >
> > However, where possible, I really think we should make the
> > translations of policies as "official" as possible, especially for
> > things as important as the privacy policy.
> >
> > I would hate us to fall in the GFDL pit of having one unintelligible
> > policy in English and arguing that it was the only valid one. For some
> > languages (unfortunately not for all), we probably have enough people
> > with the skills to make sure the policy has the same core meaning as
> > the English one, that it takes into consideration the specificities of
> > one language and/or culture. If it can be approved by the relevant
> > people and made official, all the better. Creative Commons did it...
> > if anyone else, I think *we* can do it too. ;-)
> >
> > But still, I think your idea is a good one, and should be adopted widely.
>
>
> Delphine
>
> --
> ~notafish
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>


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