[Foundation-l] Translations fundraising.wikimedia.org

[David Strauss]

The system FundCORE replaced was English-only, so I saw no harm in 
implementing it with English first and adding translations shortly 
after. Now in the case of the other side of the fundraising effort (site 
notices and fundraising submission pages), I agree that more 
organization ahead of time would have smoothed things along.

Gary Kirk wrote:
> I think what should be taken from all this is that translation
> requests should be made and publicised *well* before the whatever
> we're translating about happens - for stuff we know about obviously -
> like the Fundraiser. 'The Fundraiser starts tomorrow' is not much
> notice, is it?
> 
> On 12/22/06, habj <sweetadelaide at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2006/12/22, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> I doubt that will make a difference, as I only used the notes that
>>> were in English to help me.  Provided that a Thai dictionary, for
>>> instance, has similar quality notes (and this is a good but not
>>> exceptional dictionary) I see no reason why this should be impossible.
>>>
>>> Yes, a knowledge of the language and culture is helpful.  But it's not
>>> completely impossible to manage without for these simple phrases.
>> IMHO we are splitting hairs. Of course there exists lists of words
>> that are simple enough that they can be translated with only a
>> dictionary! (and some context, or you can not use the explanation and
>> notes in your dictionary). The question is how common these cases are,
>> and I'd say that partly depends on how afraid you are of silly
>> mistakes. One might realise that when put in context, the simple word
>> has the wrong grammatical form... since the language one translates
>> from does not distinguish between these two etc. etc. ad nauseam.
>>
>> I've translated MediaWiki messages "blindly". It often worked OK, some
>> had to be tweaked when we discovered where they were used. That was no
>> big deal. In PR material, such as this fundraising stuff, silly
>> mistakes look much worse. I think this discussion still somehow hovers
>> around the topic of C.O.R.E. and to me it is clear that a translation
>> with just a dictionary would be less satisfactory, so that correct
>> English in most cases is a better alternative.
>>
>> /habj
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> 
>