[Foundation-l] Meta-arbcom (was: the foundations of...)

[hillgentleman]

On 05/01/2008, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Retranslate: No - if we have a case from a project whose participants use
> > French as a second lanugage, simply pick arbitrators who speak french.
>
> If you select a subset of the committee based on languages spoken,
> it's harder to ensure a "fair trial", since it's not a random
> selection. It also removes the benefit of having various points of
> view - the French speaking members are likely to be the members active
> on the French projects, so you lose the wealth of knowledge that
> members of other projects could bring.

If you select a subset of partcipants based on languages spoken,
it's even harder to ensure a *fair trial*.

>
> > Risk of misunderstanding - this will happen even if you use english only.
> > You cannot guarentee what you see is what is meant.  However, in my proposal,
> > you at least have the source language in you hand and you can verify.
> > As I have said,
> > there is  a substantial pool of wikimedians to supply important comments
>
> You can never eliminate the risk, but you can reduce it. The risk from
> people's English not being perfect is far less than the risk of
> misunderstanding an auto-translation.
>
> > There is no translation?   Do you forget that the English or French that you
> > see are translations themselves?
>
> Once you speak a language to a reasonable degree, you don't work out
> what you want to say in your native tongue and then translate it, you
> write it directly in the other language. There is no translation.

You are assuming too much.  No.  My experience with my Chinese friends
tell me that many of them do not think in English.  They think it out in 中文
and translate them into english.  Yet even more may not even do that.

See  also the recent comments from 日本 participants.

It is not a good idea to tell people "I can't serve you because you don't speak
my language" when it is your duty to serve them.

Best,
H.