[WikiEN-l] Audience
Daniel Mayer
maveric149 at yahoo.com
Mon Jan 12 23:29:04 UTC 2004
Since some people will undoubtedly not have read what I said in my posts
previous to the last one, let me clarify:
Different languages often have different traditions on how to best organize
information. This means that what passes for a great article in one language
will not necessarily translate very well into another language (meaning, it
would probably not be viewed as being great and may in fact be viewed as
being poor - even when it is translated well).
Things like dictionaries, encyclopedia, newspapers and other media are not
really the same things across different languages and thus something that
would be good in one language may not be seen as good if translated as-is
into another. For example, what constitutes a textbook - the type of thing
that it *is* - has a different tradition in different languages. Sometimes
that tradition is fairly uniform between two languages, sometimes it is very
different.
This is why having editorially independent Wikipedia versions in many
different languages is a such a great thing. A mere translation of the
English Wikipedia, for example, would not meet the expectations of what an
encyclopedia *is* (the way it should cover topics) by many non-English
speaking people. An *encyclopedia* is really a different thing in different
language traditions.
*That* is what I am talking about when I say that we have primary audiences
(those whose native language is one we are writing in) and secondary
audiences (those whose native language is something other than the language
we are writing in but who still speak in the language we are writing in). It
would be internal balkanization to allow the traditions of one language to be
used in an encyclopedia in another language.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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