[Foundation-l] Re: Proposal for multilingual coordination on foundation website

Anthere anthere9 at yahoo.com
Sun Sep 19 14:55:00 UTC 2004



Nicolas Weeger a écrit:
> <snip>
> 
>> *the title being in original language is problematic. If the original 
>> language is in japanese, that means all I will see from this page 
>> title is ?????/fr.
>> I fear it is not very informative to me to help me guess what is on 
>> the page.
> 
> 
> Well, if you don't understand japanese, you'll need to wait for en: or 
> fr: or <insert languages you speak here> translation anyway :) So not 
> knowing what the title means isn't that harmful, is it?

Well, depends whether you want to avoid missing something :-)

> And actually, we could also do something like: create [[My page/fr:]] as 
> a redirect to [[Ma page]]. We'll then know that ''My page'' does exist 
> in french, make it easy to find it through the redirect, but still have 
> a meaningful title.
> And/or, for ''static'' pages, once translated, we can move'em, and if 
> required use bots to fix links (or fix manually)

True. Redirects. We can do that :-)


>> *at least on the wmf site, I can not really say which article is the 
>> original one. Languages are alternatively worked on.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> But at some point you need to decide ONE version is the base one, imo. 
> Else, when we'll have 25+ languages, it'll be a real ugly mess to follow 
> changes. For instance en: makes a draft, translated in fr: ja: de:, then 
> ja: gets an idea, changes something in ja:, other languages need to 
> synch, then de: had another idea and changed something else and.... you 
> get the point :)
> 
> Ryo

I do get it.
But what do you suggest ? That we declare one language to be the default 
one in all cases (in this case, only english able people will have the 
possibility to change a page, since all the others will be translation), 
or that we set up committees to decide for each case which one will be 
the official ?
I fear this is unworkable.
My own position is that we will never have perfect translations, there 
will be drifts and as long as the spirit is there, that is enough to me.






More information about the wikimedia-l mailing list