[Foundation-l] Translations fundraising.wikimedia.org

Aphaia aphaia at gmail.com
Fri Dec 22 15:28:51 UTC 2006


Hello,

As a Translation subcommittee chair speaking however on an individual
basis, I would like to point out that we are volunteer teams and you
have no reason to say what we "should" do and so on. I understand
there are some heay needs and expectations, and I myself expect to see
some translated sooner or later and always I am very happy to get a
new, well proofread translations, but again I daresay there is no
translation we *should* do.

If you think something should be translated until a certain time, I
recommend you to propose the translation budget which will allows to
get contract basis translations. I strongly states in this
circumstance there is nothing we *should* do - all our current
translators are unpaid volunteers who must care for their real life
concerns.

Thank you for your understanding,

On 12/22/06, Gary Kirk <gary.kirk at gmail.com> 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
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
>
>
> --
> Gary Kirk
> _______________________________________________
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> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
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>


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KIZU Naoko
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