My opinion as an italian contributor On 2012-10-18 at 14:34:37 -0700, Jérome Armau wrote: > In non-English-speaking countries, that also means that the average > contributor: > - does not have a very good command of English (beyond the tagging > standards) > - does not know about services such as Google translate > > I'm confident a significant portion of French, German, Italian and Spanish > contributors are in this case. These people are not represented on this > mailing list, but need to be taken into account in these decisions.
you can't expect people from the project to speak French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish and every other language spoken whenever people want to form a local OSM community (or just map). If the average mapper in your community doesn't understand English and doesn't know about online translation services (my feeling is that mappers, and the computer-using population, in Italy do know about them), what you should do as a local community is to setup a translation "team" that translates important messages / threads from this (and other important global mailing lists) to and from the local one. A few examples. * When there is an important announce in this mailing list it only takes a few hours for it to be posted on the italian ML, usually translated. * For the licence change, after a few messages had been sent (in English) to every user, people from the italian ML tried to sent a personalized message (in Italian) to every local mapper. * When somebody from the Italian ML has a tagging suggestion there is usually a brief discussion, and then somebody who can write English brings it to the tagging mailing list (and translates back the results to the italian one). What the foundation/project could do is to setup a framework so that the local communities can form translation teams that could be used when there is a need to send a private message to some member. Of course there is nothing special with English; if this was the victorian internet we could all be speaking French, or maybe Esperanto. English is just what we have today as a lingua franca, and we have to use it. -- Elena ``of Valhalla'' _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
