[WikiEN-l] [Wikipedia-l] [[WP:100K]] - who here writes well in English and another language?

[Carl Peterson]

On 9/21/06, adam <underthechair at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> David Gerard wrote:
> > If you could pick an FA in another language and port it to the best
> > English-language article you can, and let us know what sort of numbers
> > of hours this takes, that would be most useful to know.
> >
> > (and, as Danny says, it beats arguing about people, process or policy)
> I translated an Italian featured article ([[Carlo Airoldi]]) earlier
> this year. It was short (only about 600 words) and it took probably
> about two or three hours. I have very little experience as a translator,
> though, and i think it could be done much quicker by a better Italian
> speaker with more experience of translation. The article in question
> would never have been featured on en, since it had no inline references
> and I wouldn't have even called it NPOV, which illustrated the problems
> with this sort of approach.


That thought occurred to me as well. As each language is allowed to set its
own standards, an FA in one language may not be an FA in another. Assuming
that the development of the criteria in each language is roughly equivalent
to that of en (and from what I've seen, that's the case, given the
proportion of articles to featured articles), the strictness of each
language's FA criteria is proportional to the number of articles it has.
Thus, it is logical to assume that en has the strictest FA requirements,
having more articles than any other language. That said, the French criteria
appear to be essentially a translation of the English criteria. The German
FA process doesn't seem to have a set criteria in the concise sense of en,
but instead seems to be based on a general article about considerations
while writing an article.

Furthermore, as "brilliant prose" tends to be one of the main sticking
points on an FAC in my experience (next to the use of in-line refs), what
may be "brilliant prose" in one language may not be so in another language,
either because of writing convention (cultural or otherwise), assumption of
technical expertise, or the fact that an article in language X just doesn't
read well when translated to language Y.

Carl