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

Wed Nov 30 09:08:44 UTC 2005

On 11/30/05, Elisabeth Bauer <elian at djini.de> wrote:
> "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.

I like the idea, because I believe we need to pay more attention to
those "cultural differences". And I am not for literal translations
either, because

However, where possible, I really think we should make the
translations of policies as "official" as possible, especially for
things as important as the privacy policy.

I would hate us to fall in the GFDL pit of having one unintelligible
policy in English and arguing that it was the only valid one. For some
languages (unfortunately not for all), we probably have enough people
with the skills to make sure the policy has the same core meaning as
the English one, that it takes into consideration the specificities of
one language and/or culture. If it can be approved by the relevant
people and made official, all the better. Creative Commons did it...
if anyone else, I think *we* can do it too. ;-)

But still, I think your idea is a good one, and should be adopted widely.

Best,

Delphine
--
~notafish