[WikiEN-l] Category translation

Wed Jun 7 12:46:27 UTC 2006

Elisabeth Bauer wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro schrieb:
> 
>> Jimbo and others have also made it clear that any cultural distinction
>> between different language Wikipedias is accidental and in fact goes
>> against the intention (this in the context of which languages should
>> have a Wikipedia, but the idea carries here as well).  We don't have a
>> British Encyclopedia and an American one, because we can both
>> understand each other well enough to communicate.  If it were
>> *possible* to automatically translate all articles into every language
>> while keeping the content the same, we'd do so.  It just isn't, at
>> least not with current technology.
> 
> Yes, the original plan was to write all articles in Esperanto and then
> have them autotranslated to all the other languages of the world. But
> somehow, this didn't work out so well.
> 
> The rest of your posting is sort of new to me (I wasn't aware that
> cultural distinctions between different language Wikipedias were to be
> regarded as accidental and against the intention of Wikipedia proper)

Of course it is new to you, since Anthony just made it up out of thin
air.  :)

For the record, and as I have said many times in the past, I do NOT
think that cultural distinctions between difference language Wikipedias
are accidental or to be regarded as accidental, and even if it were
possible to translate every article using machine translation, I cannot
imagine that we would want to do so.

Anyway, if we were going to use a constructed meta-language, obviously
it would be Klingon or Toki Pona. ;-)

--Jimbo