[Foundation-l] Push translation

[stevertigo]

Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> I would like to add to this that I think the worst part of this idea
> is the assumption that other languages should take articles from
> en.wp.

The idea is that most of en.wp's articles are well-enough written, and
written in accord with NPOV to a sufficient degree to overcome any
such criticism of 'imperial encyclopedism.'

Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> Nobody's arguing here that language and culture have no relationship.
> What I'm saying is that language does not equal culture. Many people
> speak French who are not part of the culture of France, for example
> the cities of Libreville and Abidjan in Africa.

Africa is an unusual case given that it was so linguistically diverse
to begin with, and that its even moreso in the post-colonial era, when
Arabic, French, English, and Dutch remain prominent marks of
imperialistic influence.

Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> This is well suited for the dustbin of terrible ideas.  It ranks right
> up there with the notion that the European colonization of Africa was
> for the sole purpose of civilizing the savages.

This is the 'encyclopedic imperialism' counterargument. I thought I'd
throw it out there. As Bendt noted above, Google has already been
working on it for two years and has had both success and failure. It
bears mentioning that their tools have been improving quite steadily.
A simple test such as /English -> Arabic -> English/ will show that.

Note that colonialism isnt the issue. It still remains for example a
high priority to teach English in Africa, for the simple reason that
language is almost entirely a tool for communication, and English is
quite good for that purpose.  Its notable that the smaller colonial
powers such as the French were never going to be successful at
linguistic imperialism in Africa, for the simple reason that French
has not actually been the lingua franca for a long time now.

> Key to the growth of Wikipedias in minority languages is respect for the
> cultures that they encompass, not flooding them with the First-World
> Point of View.  What might be a Neutral Point of View on the English
> Wikipedia is limited by the contributions of English writers.  Those who
> do not understand English may arrive at a different neutrality.  We have
> not yet arrived at a Metapedia that would synthesize a single neutrality
> from all projects.

I strongly disagree. Neutral point of view has worked on en.wp because
its a universalist concept. The cases where other language wikis
reject English content appear to come due to POV, and thus a violation
of NPOV, not because - as you seem to suggest - the POV in such
countries must be considered "NPOV."

Casey Brown <lists at caseybrown.org> wrote:
> I'm surprised to hear that coming from someone who I thought to be a
> student of languages.  I think you might want to read an
> article from today's Wall Street Journal, about how language
> influences culture (and, one would extrapolate, Wikipedia articles).

I had just a few days ago read Boroditsky's piece in Edge, and it
covers a lot of interesting little bits of evidence. As Mark was
saying, linguistic relativity (or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) has been
around for most of a century, and its wider conjectures were strongly
contradicted by Chomsky et al. Yes there is compelling evidence that
language does "channel" certain kinds of thought, but this should not
be overstated. Like in other sciences, linguistics can sometimes make
the mistake of making *qualitative judgments based on a field of
*quantitative evidence.  This was essentially important back in the
40s and 50s when people were still putting down certain
quasi-scientific conjectures from the late 1800s.

Still there are cultures which claim their languages to be superior in
certain ways simply because they are more sonorous or emotive, or
otherwise expressive, and that's the essential paradigm that some
linguists are working in.

-SC