On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 20:44, Frederik Ramm <frede...@remote.org> wrote: > Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote: >> The wording can doubtless be improved (please do so!), and maybe >> there's something more to cover. Let's try to keep it short though. > > I think the wording is ok, but I would advise against translating it. I > believe that presenting a crowdsource-translated "summary" above an English > "legalese" could be interpreted as misleading the users. > > Personally, I think that translations are a problem in many places in OSM. > Stuff is translated and then starts to rot because whoever did the > translation goes hunting for the next non-translated bit. This is just the > same as with imports; the translations create documents that nobody cares > about, that do not have a community to support them.
It's not misleading if you make sure to note that the summary or the translation isn't canonical. See what I did with the copyright page[1] for an example (only works if you don't view it in English). I'm also talking about translating it on Translatewiki not the OpenStreetMap wiki. The former doesn't suffer from bitrotted translations because out of date translations are automatically marked as obsolete. They'll be removed in time if they're not updated. > There seem to be some areas where it works, but I have the impression that > triumphantly adding a 23rd language to some page on the Wiki does not, > overall, improve quality. The website is now available in just under 70 languages. You have to consider that a lot of the people speaking those languages don't understand English *at all*. The English-only terms might as well be in Klingon as far as their understanding of them goes. Of course you have to be careful when translating texts in legalese (or their summaries). I think the copyright page does a good job of this, allowing translations while explicitly declaring the English version to be canonical. A summary also helps native English speakers. Users are very prone to completely ignore long legal texts and blindly click "Agree". They're much more likely to read and understand a short summary intended for the layman. 1. http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
