RE: translation Circus

Hi Gareth,

Overlooking the insensitivity in your mail towards many languages, I think that you raise some important points. I would be very willing to proofread ALL Hindi translations, assuming that they continue to pour in at a rate similar to what we have seen in the past. I would support any w3 initiative to formalize a peer review system.

To begin with, it is debatable whether translations of "lesser" languages should be accepted, even if we could define "lesser" languages. Additionally, here is a list of the top 20 languages in the world ranked by users (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers ). Based on your comments, a majority of these would be rated as unworthy

Mandarin 873 million
Spanish 322 million
English 309 million
Arabic 206 million
Hindi 181 million to 948 million (depending on whether you include dialects. My translations are dialiect neutral)
Portuguese 177.5 million
Bengali 171 million
Russian 145 million
Japanese 122 million
German 95.4 million
Wu 77.2 million
Javanese 75.5 million
Telugu 69.7 million
Marathi 68 million
Vietnamese 67.4 million
Korean 67 million
Tamil 66 million
French 64.8 million
Italian 61.5 million
Punjabi 90 million
Urdu 60.5 million

I too have my complaints with the "circus." For e.g., one of my translations has not been accepted for close to two months despite repeated assurances. But that has not deterred me from working on 4 others :) I guess I am very patient. And as a kid I loved circuses :) I think we have a good thing going here. Periodic revisions of checks and balances are a good idea. But let us not drive the circus out of town :)

Thanks
Ajeet Khurana
http://www.ajeetkhurana.com



________________________________

Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2007 13:17:23 +0100
From: gareth.edison@googlemail.com
To: w3c-translators@w3.org
Subject: translation Circus


Good evening everyone here at w3c translations,



As a long time supporter of the W3C project I would like to voice my opinion regarding the

quality of some of the translations being prodiced here on the forum.



What was supposed to be a good idea ist turning into a fiasco of link hungry webmasters posing as

translators who are translating documents no one really wants or needs. It is certainly helpfull to

be able to read these Documents in French, Dutch, German. Greek, Russian, Cinese or Japanese but

I fail to grasp the importancy of translating documents into languages like Turmen, Uzbek, Azerbajan,

Kazakh, Belarussian, Ukrainian, Estonian, Latvian, Tatar, Georgian or even Armenian.

Imagine Indian webmasters translating these documents into some of the 50 different dialects of Tamil or Sanskrit

or how about our fellow Chinese webmasters translation their chines documents into Shangjainese or Taiwanese.



My question is, where will W3c draw the line?



The Turkish translation below is just one of the results of people translating documents into languages they are not familiar with.

This document was clearly translated into Turkish from a Russian translation which is spoiling the high standard of work required by W3C

in order to produce quality translations.



Wouldnt it be much wiser to allow ONLY native speakers to translate documents for W3C instead of people producing translations

which they cant read themselves? Maybe W3c should start only allowing main languages instead of sub-divisions of these languages like the

many Russian dialects as mentioned above.



Whatever the outcome I wish you all a happy new year



Gareth



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Received on Saturday, 29 December 2007 22:34:07 UTC