On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 3:27 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <[email protected]> wrote: > A UN-like model, with several major languages, into which important > Foundation releases *must* be translated, is a realistic solution that > will enable more people to read them. This, however, also poses the > danger of perpetuating current linguistic conflicts. For example, > translating the WMF blog into Chinese will allow a lot of people who > know Chinese, but not English, read it, but it will yet again put > Chinese above the regional languages of China; the same can be said > about Russian, Spanish, French, Indonesian and other major languages. > Nevertheless, done properly, it's better than staying English-only.
This is a very interesting idea. (My last post was mostly directed at the original poster's comments about us rejecting multilingualism, not your proposal. Sorry if I didn't make that clear!) I don't know if we should necessarily say that they "*must* be translated" into those languages, since we are volunteer-driven, but this could be more of a coordinator-thing... like we need to make sure that we keep volunteers on-hand and supported who speak these languages. If we see a gap in a certain language, we'll try to replace that person ASAP. We might want to try to revive translation teams, and make sure that we always have a well-staffed translation team with members ready to translate into these big languages. Anyway, I would love to have people working to make an updated priority list that they think we should use. :-) The metrics that Mark suggests are a great idea. Number of speakers, number of monolingual (or native) speakers, and size of the editing community would be great things to consider. -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023 _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
