[Foundation-l] Three short films about Wikipedia

[Phil Nash]

Kim Bruning wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 02:02:20PM +0200, Lennart Guldbrandsson wrote:
>> Okay. I hope that I didn't stifle your comment, though. One idea:
>>
>> Feel free to dub in your own voices if you want voices. That could
>> be very cool!
>>
>> Best wishes,
>>
>> Lennart
>
> Actually, if this is going to be shown at conferences and such,
> it might be handier to add subtitles? :-)
>
> sincerely,
> Kim Bruning

Seriously, dubbing dialogue, although *kewl*, would be a triumph of hope 
over experience, and technically and practically infeasible within a 
sensible timescale, but when it comes to subtitles, the question has to be 
"in how many languages?" A good starting point is 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_languages, which has

Arabic
Chinese (Mandarin)
English
French
Russian
Spanish (Castilian)

as core, but

Bengali
Hindustani
Portuguese
Esperanto

as proposed.

Of these, I would regard languages of the Indian subcontinent as being of 
higher priority, since (IME) speakers of Spanish can get to grips wth 
Portuguese at least at a basic level, and Esperanto does not seem to have 
had the penetration it might deserve.

What is perhaps surprising is that Japanese is missing from both these 
lists, but then perhaps most Japanese are also pretty competent in English 
these days.