about languages and translations

Dear friends,

Here you have a proposal for the languages and translation issue. Of course, we'll have to discuss it in our next general chat (next Wednesday), but it'll be good to have an exchange this Saturday.

For tomorrow, I think we'll have at least to talk about :
- mapping,
- translation and languages.

But we'll surely other things to talk about...

In solidarity,

Christophe

About languages and translations in the website.

Before to be more precise, one precision: if people in America and Africa can understand and communicate in one of the 4 WSF languages, it's not at the case of most of Europe and Asia. Now, for example, we have always Turkish translation even in the European Preparatory Assemblies, where come only "leaders" or "responsible of international relations" from big Unions or Movements. And it's exactly the same in Korea, Japan, Thailand, etc. For this reason, our model cannot be the one which was used in the WSF (4 main languages) but more the European one (in Athens we had 8 written languages and during the Assembly of Social Movements we translated in 12 or 13 languages).

About websites, we have the experience of the ESF & WSF workspace (the CMS was in Plone) in which one we had to distinguish 3 levels:

• what the system allow us to do; Drupal supports probably a lot of languages, but Ben can give us more precisions,

• the interfaces and important contents (for example the call for the 26th) we want to have in all the languages,

• the content produce by users to communicate with other activists and to show their activities.


Knowing those things and remembering our option to give priority to "see and show", I think we could adopt some principles.

1/ We encourage everyone to understand the necessity to separate as much as it's possible the language of exchange to built initiatives and action and the language used to publish to the International audience information about those actions.

2/ The communication languages are the languages used by activists, and we'll have Russian, Korean, Turkish, Japanese, etc.

3/ The publication languages are what people want to do, but we strongly encourage them to "publish" very short info (what, where, when for example "Demonstration, Place de la République, Paris, the 26th at 3pm" or "Public Conference at the Bundestag, Berlin, the 25th and the 26th", etc.) in English, the most used international language.

In practise, for the website, that could be:

• Front page, the map, the countries entrance points (links) in national languages, interfaces in English, news in English = random news in other languages,

• National pages, actions and cities in local languages chosen by users, if we have 10 languages, that means the process for the action day is bad, 20 languages that we have a good process and 30 an excellent process…

• For the "web team" that means that we prepare "kits" including interfaces and key texts (my proposal, the call + a "why and how to be part if the day of action" text) and each time a country page is open, this kit has to be translated in the country language by Babel or local activists (we can start the translation in languages we know they will be there, French, Spanish, Russian, Korean, etc.),

• For the map, we try to have very short "pitch" with short info in English (what, where, when) and not written content (photos, video), but used do what they want.


Resolution