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

[Aphaia]

First, as for translation/transliteration, in Japanese we call WMF
Wikimedia "Zaidan" (in Kanji, 財団), transcript Wikimedia in katakana
and translate Foundation. Zaidan is both a part of Japanese civil code
terminology for non-profit corporates, and prefer to a translation of
"Fund", "Foundation" "Stiffung" etc.

On the other hand, if I recall correctly, German community prefer to
keep the English name "Wikimedia Foundation".

Again I say, it depends on highly your audience - and of course if WMF
Board/Office has an opinion, we are happy to hear from them (anyway it
is their name, or not?)

On 12/31/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> When the Foundation was young and dinosaurs ruled the earth, I tried to
> get clear answers about how translations of project names and other such
> names should be managed, but the board at the time was not really
> interested in getting involved in the issue. (IMHO that's a problem when
> it comes to branding and trademark management...)

The time seems to be coming, or has come. Chinese community recently
has reported there are some possible transliteration of wiki into
Chinese, and any other transliterations than our Chinese friend has
been adopting could be registered by the third parties, if I recall
correctly; there are tons of letter which are pronounced "wi" and also
"ki" ...

> Might be worth popping the question over at HQ, see what current
> management thinks, but I would not be surprised if they don't consider
> it that big an issue to muddle in either.
>
> In theory this ought to be a question for the executive director
> (presently Brad) rather than bugging individual board members, I suppose...

Sure, I saw a Chinese editor asked one possible transliteration of
Wikiversity is okay to the Foundation. I thought Brad answered
affirmatively (and the transliteration seemed to me the most natural
candidate according to our current custom), but I am not sure if the
Foundation would go to register/claim that Chinese literation
(Wikiversity itself hasn't been registered IIRC...)

For further discussion, if we have a summary of this list of
translation/-literation, it might be helpful. Has anyone alreay begin
to summarize?

-- 
KIZU Naoko
  Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
  * Nessuna poesia prima di noi *