[Foundation-l] Push translation

[stevertigo]

Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Suppose for a minute that your proposal were implemented, and all the
> machine translation problems were overcome. Would English NPOV be so
> good that community members in the target language would be incapable of
> making substantive improvements? And if they did make substantive
> change, how would you reconcile the divergence when both versions were
> subsequently edited?

Its a good question Ray. I'll avoid treating it as a technical one,
because there is no simple technical solution for it. Suffice it to
say that if another language has an article which en.wp lacks, then
there should be no problem with them "pushing" it to en.wp.

There are a couple implicit assumptions in your term "English NPOV:"
1) that English NPOV is some kind of acceptable POV localized to
English language contexts, or that 2) that there are qualitative
differences between NPOV vis-a-vis the language being used.  It may be
interesting to see if we can do some testing for NPOV on those
languages which Google can translate. We could pick a field of
articles, read them over for completeness, etc. and grade them for
neutrality.

> I'm disinclined to accept your universalist conjecture.  It sounds too
> much like intelligent design for linguistics. When I visit the
> bookstores in another country I am struck by the difference in emphasis
> that they put on different topics.  This alone is bound to lead to
> different neutralities.

Careful with cultural relativity: There is a difference between
"emphasis" and "meaning." If you look over time at a single bookstore
in your own country, you will find emphasis rapidly changing based on
the local mood or interests. There's no way one can expect such things
as mood and interest to be correlated.

There are a couple implicit notions in this idea of a universal NPOV:
That people are in fact intelligent, and regardless of the language
system they use, they can design their articles according to NPOV.  I
don't see what's controversial about that, or how different cultures
require "different neutralities."

-SC