[Translators-l] Translate "Wikimedia Foundation" or not?

habj sweetadelaide at gmail.com
Sat Dec 30 13:37:48 UTC 2006


Different languages translate real names to varying degree. Do you
translate the name "Wikimedia Foundation" to your individual
languages, or do you leave it as it is?

For a start, I did translate "Foundation" to "Stiftelsen" ("Wikimedia
Foundation" => "stiftelsen Wikimedia"). I took Wikimedia for the name,
and "foundation" as a description. Then I was told that WMF
technically actually is not a foundation, but a non-commercial
company. If the WMF actually is not a foundation it seems misleading
to translate the word "Foundation", and anyhow translations of true
names is a troublesome business. Currently I most of the time
abbreviate it "WMF", which seems smoother than writing "Wikimedia
Foundation" over and over in Swedish text.

Has this been discussed anywhere? Has the Board, or anyone else,
voiced opinions?

/HB



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