I have been involved with efforts to translate medical content into as many languages as possible since 2012 in collaboration with Translators Without Borders, donations of translation time by for-profit translation companies, and movement volunteers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Translation_tas...
It takes a lot of time and effort to build capacity and to coordinate volunteers. I have personally hired a project manager to help and the WMF was providing support to one collaborator through an IEG.
I guess the question is how do we prioritize this work versus other translation efforts? We switched to writing three to four paragraph simplier summaries of topic in English specifically for translation as translating entire high quality articles was too resource intensive.
James
On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 10:13 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
On 2016-03-11 18:00, Sydney Poore wrote:
Hello Yaroslav
Thanks for your reply.
My point is that there is no clear strategy or process for prioritizing which pages get translated. So, perhaps it is easy for some people to be mixed up.
But I'm pretty confident that I understand the issues, and I'm not getting anything mixed up. :-)
<...>
This dynamic in the wikimedia movement needs to change. It is exclusionary and unwelcoming.
We can not reach the people that the wikimedia movement needs to reach if the burden of translation of these important official WMF processes a completely volunteer process.
Going forward, I would like to see the percentage of pages translated as a metric that is tracked, reported, and discussed regularly.
Warm regards, Sydney
Thank you, it more clear now.
However, my point is we can not translate everything to all languages. we do not have and we will never have resources for that. We need to prioritize. I would say in the case of the upcoming elections, it would be great to know what languages we need to translate the documents into - the languages spoken by the members of boards of the organizations who actually intend to vote, and only in the case they do not speak English. I asked this already a week ago in this very same topic of the mailing list, and got a reply from someone (was it Amir? - sorry, I can not easily check it now) that there is a generic list of languages important messages get translated into. In this situation, I would say, we need first to make a custom list for these elections - hopefully it is more narrow than the generic list, and then see what is the best way to proceed. I am not sure there is a general solutions - probably different documents just need to be translated into different sets of languages.
Cheers Yaroslav
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