[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Wikimedia Foundation's 2010-11 Annual Report

[Jay Walsh]

Thanks for bringing up translation. I intended to bring this up in a
separate note.

We decided to take on translated 'summaries' this year fairly late into the
production process.  It seemed like we could handle this as
a parallel process without slowing down the main production.  That turned
out to be more or less true as the small translation group we worked with
(based in southern California) was able to tackle translation and layout
design (not creating the design, but basically filling in the blanks).

For this first effort with our annual report we wanted to outsource the
translation.  The most significant reason for this was the financials
section.  We wanted to have a company that had specialist experience in
translating US financial terminology and data.  We have to do this with
great caution due to tax and financial regulations in the US.  A
miscommunication of our finance data could cause real problems, and we
didn't want to put a volunteer in the position of making those tough calls.

The languages chosen were a balance between our geographic priorities
(Brazil, Middle East, India) and our widest base of donors and contributors
from other countries.  It's imperfect, as always - we want to do more in
the future, but we needed to get started.  These choices are by no means
part of a permanent pattern for WMF in terms of translation. Now that we
have a better understanding of the process we're hoping to expand it for
next year - but more importantly finding ways to get volunteers involved.

And yes, I think a community proof-read is another next step for next year.
 We were trying to strike a balance between speed and quality/detail.  But
we'll try more next year (and we're collecting notes and practices for the
production team right now - so this is all timely and relevant!).

jay

On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 4:57 AM, Seb35 <seb35wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:

> Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:29:51 -0800, Jay Walsh <jwalsh at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> > The Wikimedia Foundation is happy to announce the release of the 2010-11
> > Annual Report, which is now posted on the WMF Wiki at
> > http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Annual_Report
>
> Thanks for this beautiful Annual Report :) Much appreciated also the
> translations!
>
> I have two points I would like see to happen in the process of the
> creation of this report:
> * a proofread by the community before the final issue; perhaps I missed
> it, but I didn’t find anything on foundation-l; for example it has been
> remarked a typo on the second page "Jean Javier" -> "Jean Janvier",
> corrected in the wiki version
> * a proofread of the translated versions; I didn’t noticed anything on
> translation-l; I noticed a couple of translation errors in the French
> version (example: "155 millions of edits" -> "155 millions de textes", but
> "textes" = "texts", "edits" = "éditions")
>
> I know it’s quite difficult to synchronize PDF versions and wiki versions,
> but I find it’s worth trying.
>
> Sébastien
>
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-- 
Jay Walsh
Head of Communications
WikimediaFoundation.org
blog.wikimedia.org
+1 (415) 839 6885 x 6609, @jansonw