[Foundation-l] Push translation

[Oliver Keyes]

"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.' - really? It's a) not
particularly well-written, mostly and b) referenced overwhelmingly to
English-language sources, most of which are, you guessed it.. Western in
nature.

On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 3:43 AM, stevertigo <stvrtg at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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