[Foundation-l] How to develop policy in a multilingual organization

Wed Nov 30 03:16:56 UTC 2005

"If you contribute to the Wikimedia projects, you are publishing every 
word you post publicly."

german translation:
"Wenn Sie zu den Wikimedia-Projekten beitragen, veröffentlichen Sie 
jedes Wort, das sie abschicken, öffentlich."

That's the second sentence of our privacy policy, to be found on 
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy
and inspires me to loose a few words on how policy writing should be 
handled in a multilingual project:

* Decide on the core principles of the policy - the essential rules
* Create a nice, elaborate page in english which you place on the 
Foundation wiki as the official policy
* Ask the community to create inofficial translations based on the 
essential rules - they may want to phrase a few things differently, some 
things may need longer or shorter explanations depending on culture, 
country or project. They may translate the english version word by word 
but are free to formulate the essential rules in their own words if they 
prefer.
* Each translation should have a note on top that in doubt the english 
version is the valid one.

In the case of the privacy policy, I decided to act on these principles.

The german privacy policy at 
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Datenschutz tries to say the same 
as the english one but in own words. Some paragraphs and sentences which 
are not part of the core rules were shortened for the sake of clarity 
and readability.

If you disagree with this you may want to find community members who 
will create a literal translation. My feel for language and style 
doesn't allow me to do so.

greetings,
elian