[Foundation-l] keeping localization in mind

Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il
Wed Mar 23 13:17:39 UTC 2011


In the last few months i was deeply involved with several big
translation projects for Wikimedia: The Fundraising, Sue's March
Update letter, and the Editor's survey.

What's common to all of them is that the original English texts were
written without keeping localization in mind, or maybe not keeping it
in mind *enough*. I wouldn't ask for such a thing from a poet or a
journalist, but i would expect it from a writer of a text that has a
particular function - to raise money from various countries, to
describe the state of a multilingual community, or to conduct a
worldwide research - and about which it is known that it will be
translated to dozens of very different languages, each with a culture
behind it.

I can give several examples:

==Eternal September==
Sue's letter links to the English Wikipedia article [[Eternal
September]]. The fact that it's an English Wikipedia article is
already a problem - for people who don't know English linking there is
pointless.

But there's more to it. Since the letter was published, it was
translated to several languages, and some translators also went the
extra mile to create the [[Eternal September]] article in their
respective Wikipedias. Until here, all good. Now, i don't know about
other languages, but in the Hebrew Wikipedia such articles are
sometimes proposed for deletion, because they are about "foreign
expressions which are not used in Hebrew". I completely disagree with
such reasoning and i created this article nevertheless, but the fact
is that it happens and in addition to translating it could have had to
jump through the hoops of a deletion discussion.

This is only one possible implication out of many that are imaginable.
I'm not telling the future writers of letters to the community not to
link to the English Wikipedia; i'm just telling them to keep in mind
that it may involve more than they think it does.

==WikiLove, Twinkle and Huggle==
Sue mentions the WikiLove gadget in her letter. To the best of my
knowledge WikiLove only works in the English Wikipedia, but the letter
invites all readers to use it. Believe it or not, some Wikipedias
don't even have barnstars.

The survey mentions Twinkle and Huggle. These gadgets are also
specific to the English Wikipedia. They were adapted to other
projects, but not to all of them; for example, i couldn't find them in
the very large French and Portuguese Wikipedias. Asking editors of
these Wikipedias about Twinkle and Huggle is not just pointless, but
patronizing, too.

(This gadget thing is a part of a larger issue: gadgets development is
not coordinated, even though many of them could be useful to all
projects.)

==Gender in the survey==
I already wrote about this: Surveys tend to be long lists of questions
in the second person. This is not a problem in English, but in some
languages the second person is strongly gender-dependent. IIRC, the
translations are supposed to be finished by today. If the survey would
be announced earlier, the translators would have time to write a
feminine version and developers would have time to think of modifying
LimeSurvey to actually support it. (Actually i haven't completely
given up on it yet.)

==Nationality in the survey==
The survey asks about "Nationality". This term is not consistent even
in English: it may mean the place of birth, the place of current
citizenship, the genetic ethnic group, the national identity and other
things. In Russian, my native language, the related word
(национальность) refers *only* to the ethnic group. I happen to be
aware of the ambiguity in English, so i bothered to ask about the
precise meaning, but another translator - certainly, in good faith -
translated it as "ethnic group" (i asked to correct it). And in the
first place the survey should have been written as unambiguously as
possible.

==Currencies in the Fundraising==
In the Fundraising letters currencies were mentioned. These currencies
are not relevant for the whole world.

==Repetition==
Some texts are repetitive, for example whole sentences in the
Fundraising letters and "choose all that apply" in the survey. But
they aren't marked as such - they are just copied and pasted.
MediaWiki has templates for that! Another thing that must be done to
reduce repetitiveness is migrating to a proper translating platform
instead of plain MediaWiki; see
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28021 .

I have many more examples of such problems. Of course, i understand
that a writer in English cannot think of everything in advance and i
don't want to stifle the creativity of the writers; and i do believe
that there is creativity behind this texts, even though they are more
functional than artistic. All i'm asking is to think about these
examples and to remember that
a. texts had to be translated.
b. translation has more implications than you initially imagine.

Thank you for understanding.

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
"We're living in pieces,
 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore



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