Re: [wg-review] RE: [idno] [TRANSLATION] Language divide

[Luca Muscarà <muscara@unive.it>]

Dear Members,

despite (or maybe because of) the fact that my first language is Italian and it
happened that I have translated three or four books from English and French
into my mother language, I would like to propose a few observations.

1. Of course I naturally agree that in a perfect world, a perfect ICANN would
need to translate any relevant document in any of the languages of the
represented countries in the ccTLDs.

2. Nevertheless, it seems to me that at the present state, this is a FALSE
problem that is actually hiding a bigger and unresolved problem, which has
variously called in this same wg as the "number 1 problem": the issue of
education and training. As somebody pointed out, a language divide is not only
or necessarily that between national languages, as it is very obvious that
there could be linguistic incomprehensions even among citizens of the same
country that speak different dialects.

3. My experience with this wg is that the GREATEST language barrier I have
encountered is produced by a double necessity:
on one side it is evident that given the wide number of issues involved, it is
a common working practice to use acronyms and refer to issues in synthetic
terms for brevity, so, just as any linguist would say, any group develops its
own "code"; (not to speak about making reference to specific technological
issues of computing and networking); on the other side, this wg has continued
to grow and of course knowledge about the issues we are dealing with is very
unbalanced, to say the least.

For these reasons the first language issue is NOT that of English vs. Spanish,
Arabic, Chinese, German, French, Greek or Swahili etc.
but the issue of allowing newcomers to catch up with what it is happening here,
as somebody said, just in plain English, with an updated reference page of the
issues discussed under the different headers and a page of all the acronyms
that have been used in the past 2000 messages (plus all the others coming from
dnso, icann, etc,) and a set of rules for contributing messages to this mailing
list and a weekly report of synthesis of the state-of-the-discussion happening.
These types of tools would really make a difference in widening participation
and sharing knowledge, given that everybody that ended up into this list MUST
have enough understanding of the English language and of the Internet to allow
him/her to access this list, even if not necessarily enough to participate
fruitfully for the benefit of himself and of others to the ongoing debate.

I imagine that for some members, the frustration experienced because of the
inability to actively participate to the debate on the relevant issues of this
wg--due to the above mentioned reasons and basically to the lack of time for
training--have IMO produced this request for a translation service, but I do
not believe that this will bring the solution to the lack of training. It is
natural that, given this context, many would think that bringing back the
discussion to their national language could be of help, but this is not the
solution and in my view it is just a further step towards the complete
Babelization of this list.

Finally, I do not think that this is the right place to complain about the wide
diffusion of English language compared to that of other languages or to
complain about the fact that the world's history has put the US of A in the
power position it has right now. And  arguing about US cultural imperialism is
pretextous: the Internet was built because of the Cold War  and we cannot
change past history even if we may hope to have a chance to do something about
our future.

Best regards,

Luca Muscarà



--
This message was passed to you via the wg-review@dnso.org list.
Send mail to majordomo@dnso.org to unsubscribe
("unsubscribe wg-review" in the body of the message).
Archives at http://www.dnso.org/archives.html