[Translators-l] Translation request for turning on the Page Previews feature on the second group of Wikipedias

[Philippe Verdy]

Note that you have forbidden French, but have allowed "Simple English"
which is definitely not a priority (standard English is already in the
source, and there's actually no real need to "simplify" it in this
translation request).

In general all major linguas francas (spoken in many countries) should be
enabled in all translation requests, even if it's not the final intended
target. And anyway this page is important for all languages, not just
minority ones, as it is about a new general feature.

As the result, you'll get translations ONLY in countries where English is
widely understood as a official, regional or native primary/secondary
language, and widely taught in schools with a good skill level. This
request won't work like you'd like in South America (except possibly
Argentina but you don't have any minority language listed for that
country), India (English is secondary, Hindi is official, but many people
cannot read English and translate it correctly to their regional language),
South-East Asia, Western/North/Central Africa. And where another major
lingua franca is used (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese),
English understanding translation skills are largely underdeveloped.

2017-04-13 16:11 GMT+02:00 Philippe Verdy <verdy_p at wanadoo.fr>:

> Why forbidding French ? Many of the minority languages selected are for
> users that cannot understand English but would more likely read French
> (notably in Africa, but also in Canada), and could translate from the
> French base (or at least read the French version in case of ambiguity)
>
> English is frequently a very ambiguous language (absence of orthographic
> distinction of nouns vs. verbs, frequent ommission of prepositions, many
> terms with multiple meanings, abuse of capitalization...). English is not
> the only "lingua franca" of the world, you can safely add French, Spanish,
> Russian, Arabic, Hindi and Chinese. But French, Spanish, Russian and
> Chinese are... forbidden here!
>
> In all the listed languages allowed, these are spoken by very small
> communities with very few contributors on Wikimedia, and even less ones
> that are translators: if you restrict them to be able to read and
> understand English, you'll get almost no translation for many of these
> languages where English is not a **major** secondary language.
>
> Take an example: translating to Breton (Brezhoneg), not a lot translators
> for this language, but almost all of them use French as their primary
> language (Breton is almost always a secondary regional language understood
> now by a minority in its native region), English is much less understood by
> these translators and they would appreciate having a good quality French
> version at least to check what they more or less attempt to read in English.
>
> 2017-04-12 19:12 GMT+02:00 Chris Koerner <ckoerner at wikimedia.org>:
>
>> Hello my multilingual friends,
>>
>> I have a favor to ask. The Reading team at the foundation is getting
>> ready to start the second round of deployments for the Page Previews
>> feature. We are trying to reach as many communities as we can in their
>> language. Translating this message to the communities in this group would
>> be very helpful and much appreciated - both from me and the communities
>> themselves! :)
>>
>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:CKoerner_(WMF)/Enable_
>> Hovercards/Phase_1
>>
>> As always, you're a beautiful person and I appreciate the help.
>>
>> Yours,
>> Chris Koerner
>> Community Liaison - Discovery
>> Wikimedia Foundation
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Translators-l mailing list
>> Translators-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/translators-l
>>
>>
>
-------------- section suivante --------------
Une pièce jointe HTML a été nettoyée...
URL: <https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/translators-l/attachments/20170413/21191493/attachment.html>