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

Wed Nov 30 10:55:40 UTC 2005

Oooops. missing part of a sentence.

On 11/30/05, Delphine Ménard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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...

...because those, as you pointed out, do not take into consideration
concepts, ideas, core values that a language carries, and even
sometimes possible interpretations due to the language that would
change the meaning entirely.

>
> 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.

Delphine

--
~notafish