[Foundation-l] WMF 2015 strategic plan and multilingualism

[M. Williamson]

2011/3/5 Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il>:
> will enable more people to read them. This, however, also poses the
> danger of perpetuating current linguistic conflicts. For example,
> translating the WMF blog into Chinese will allow a lot of people who
> know Chinese, but not English, read it, but it will yet again put
> Chinese above the regional languages of China; the same can be said
> about Russian, Spanish, French, Indonesian and other major languages.

Of course the same could be said of any option that does not translate
everything into every language of the world which has monolingual
speakers. This doesn't mean we should translate all WMF documents into
Hopi, Kunama, Irish and Pirahã; that would be practically impossible,
in fact even the most determined of organizations, missionary groups,
have not achieved translation of anything into all languages with
monolingual speakers. Yes, translating documents only into (for
example) English, Spanish and French would leave out monolingual
Quechua speakers, monolingual Basque speakers and monolingual Yoruba
speakers, but it's simply not possible to reach every language, so
decisions have to be made about which ones we are going to include. It
is my hope that these decisions are data-driven -
http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=size and the
size of Wikimedia communities speaking a language as well as the
(in)frequency of bilingualism in those communities are a good place to
start.