[OSM-talk] Voting for adding the Translate extension to the OSM Wiki now open

Tue Apr 26 16:17:24 UTC 2022

That's why using the extension is *optional* for translation. You can still
use the old system if you believe a page should not be a 1:1 translation
and English-based (though you can have the source page language in other
languages).

lectrician1 <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Lectrician1>

El mar, 26 abr 2022 a la(s) 09:05, Frederik Ramm (frederik at remote.org)
escribió:

> Hi,
>
> On 22.04.22 23:55, Seth Deegan wrote:
> > Voting for the proposal to add the Translate extension to the OSM Wiki
> > <
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Add_Translate_extension_to_Wiki>
>
> > has now started.
>
> I see the voting has prematurely been aborted due to new information
> about the plugin.
>
> My main concern for voting against this proposal was that, from what I
> understood, the underlying idea is that
>
> * all information about all tags should ideally be the same in all
> languages
>
> * if something diverges from "the global information" in one language
> that diverging information must either be translated to English to
> become part of the "the global information", or at the very least it
> must be clearly identified which is the differing part so that it can
> somehow be isolated in a language-specific subpage.
>
> I am not sure if I have perhaps misunderstood something. One other voter
> who was in favour of the plugin has written: "I am voting yes so that
> the fledgling mapping community in Puerto Rico can more easily maintain
> Spanish-language documentation that recognizes their country-specific
> tagging nuances; so that developers in Vietnam don't need fluency in the
> wiki's particular dialect of English in order to interpret our data
> correctly; but most of all, so that we can try this out and see if it
> works for us. Unlike with a tagging proposal, we will have a very
> decisive solution if this turns out to be a terrible idea: uninstall the
> extension."
>
> The way I see it, the "fledgling mapping community in Puerto Rico" would
> first have to analyse the differences between what their current
> documentation says and what the English version says in order to then
> produce a document that describes the differences. Where those
> differences are nunances (for example, where the English version says
> that something "is usually done" and the Spanish version says it "should
> be done"), people will often not go through the effort to actually
> retain these flavours because it would sound silly to write down
> explicitly "for Puerto Rico, replace 'usually done' with 'should be
> done'" or so).
>
> In my mind, a move to this extension would massively impact the
> understanding of the wiki; it would cement the dominance of English, and
> every local information that diverges from the mainstream English would
> have to be explicitly asserted as a deviation from the mainstream,
> whereas currently someone can document something in their language
> totally independent of what is said in other langauges.
>
> This, in my eyes, represents a cultural change and the exact opposite of
> what the voter above painted in rosy diversity colours.
>
> Being a cultural, not a technical change, it will be impossible to
> simply revert it by deinstalling the extension.
>
> (The same commenter said, in a different context, that a 50% majority
> should be enough to install the plugin and anything else was setting the
> hurdle too high, again claiming that you can simply uninstall the
> extension if you don't like it. I think this is assumption is naive at
> best - unless concrete plans are presented how all the changes made in
> support of the extension would be rolled back with little effort.)
>
> In order for me to support the installation of this extension, I would
> have to have certainty that the aforementioned rosy language "the
> mapping community in Puerto Rico can more easily maintain
> Spanish-language documentation that recognizes their country-specific
> tagging nuances" is actually true and not just an excellent exercise in
> rhetoric. I want to see a concrete example how someone who speaks only
> Spanish, only German, only Polish, can go to their language's
> highway=path page and add some information there in their language...
>
> ... WITHOUT having to navigate to a sub-section or sub-page that is
> reserved for language-specific stuff ("you can't edit the stuff up here,
> please go down there to add your information")
>
> ... WITHOUT having to fear that something they added will be overridden
> by conflicting information a second person has added to the English page
> and a third person has translated to Spanish/German/Polish
>
> ... WITHOUT having to first mentally dissect what the international
> standard is and how whatever they want to add diverges or not from the
> international standard and then clad it in appropriate markup
>
> I'm willing to be convinced but frankly, what I've heard until now seems
> largely marketing-speak and empty promises. "There will be some corner
> of the wiki where people can document special cases" is not enough. In
> fact, I even object to the idea that there is one standard documentation
> and then possible "divergence" from that. One voter in favour of the
> plugin writes "the LibreOffice wiki translation process is so much
> better now" and this explains quite well what I feel - I think there's a
> mindset that assumes OSM is some kind of software like LibreOffice and
> everything is about describing the features of this software. But
> tagging standards and conventions are the result of a social process,
> not the description of the capabilities of some software.
>
> And I think that everyone who says "let's just try that, we can always
> go back" knows full well that it will only be weeks until it will be
> impossible to go back.
>
> If we want to install this for a "trial" then we should clearly limit
> which pages it is to be used on (and those should not be tagging pages).
> Use it for a description of the API or the data model, or the history of
> OpenStreetMap or something. I can live with that.
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
> --
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
>
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