[alac] translations

[Jean Armour Polly <mom@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi- I totally agree that major and minor ICANN and ALAC documents 
should be translated into as many languages as possible. We have a 
budget for it, do we not? How can we get some of that money spent, 
Bruce? We've got a whole website to do.

However I am much less sure of the need to translate all the 
committee work discussion lists. In regard to committee work, whether 
we like it or not, the ICANN bylaws are explicit in the requirement 
that directors, representatives, etc are able to "work and 
communicate in written and spoken English."

On the other hand, there's nothing that says that a list post can't 
be in another language. But my point is very simple--that if you want 
to get other ALAC members' attention and buy-in to your point of 
view, the most expedient way to do that-- I would think--is to post 
the issue in language common to everyone on the list. We are all 
volunteers and all so busy with our jobs-- why make all your 
colleagues take the extra time to go to a machine translation 
service, every time, when you know those sites offer notoriously poor 
translations?  "Did you really mean this? Did you really mean that?" 
is what we would end up saying.

The machine translations are awful at best, and here is a perfect 
example. Consider Erick's recent response to me, which ends 
(according to machine translation Spanish to English):  "Sincerely of 
the person who less waits for a racist commentary like which you have 
done to me, was of You. Erick"  Looks to me like Erick is calling me 
a racist, "a person with a prejudiced belief that one race is 
superior to others."

Now, I could be offended and demand a public apology, or I could just 
fluff it off as a mistake in machine translation. Since  calling 
anyone a racist would be counter to the collegial nature of ALAC, to 
say nothing of a non-sequitur to my original post, I am writing it 
off to machine translation problems.

It's so hard for us to decide anything together now-- so what would 
it be like to have to wait for an official translator to post in 
several languages before we write a response? It just doesn't scale 
when a committee is trying to work. Look how long it has taken us to 
do the self-review document-- almost a year. We're still not done. 
Imagine if it were in all our mother languages and edits were done in 
all those tongues. Make no mistake-- once the committee work is 
done---translate it into many, many languages.

Just my opinion
JP


At 9:29 AM -0400 8/7/06, Jacqueline A. Morris recently said:
> Hi Jean
> My spanish isn't good, but I use a translation service to get the 
> gist - I haven' responded on the item yet cause I've been real busy.
> Yet again, I think we need to get ourselves in gear about opening up 
> to other languages... If we are serious about being representative.
> Jacqueline
> Sent via BlackBerry service from bmobile