[Foundation-l] leaflets

[Lars Aronsson]

Guillaume Paumier wrote:

> I think you're mixing two very different matters. What needs to 
> be translated or adapted is the content, i.e. the *text*. And 
> each language should write their own text, because it's always 
> better than translation. On the other hand, there's the design 
> and the layout, which don't change across languages. Once the 
> text is written, it takes nothing to add it to an existing 
> layout.

I absolutely agree that we should write our own texts.  But 
Swedish wikipedians don't spontaneously come up with a 16 page 
brochure about how to edit Wikipedia. Even if I show them the 
printed "Das kleine Wikipedia-Einmaleins", they just shake their 
heads and don't understand more than two words of the title, even 
if they took German in school.  What they need is a rough 
translation that they can read, and use as inspiration, before 
they can get started in writing a useful version in their own 
language.  And far more people can read English than German.

I have started to translate this particular text to Swedish, as a 
first step towards producing a useful Swedish version, but that 
won't help all the people who need to write one in Polish, Czech, 
Thai or Spanish.  If someone could please translate the text of 
such brochures to English, it would be very useful.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se