User:Polimerek (WMF)/Sandbox

Tasks

Pages to watch[edit]

Trans[edit]

Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Direction/Drafts/G3

Less urgent[edit]

Training modules

How to write simple communications easy to translate[edit]

Avoid corporate wording such us "dissemination", "qualitative perspectives", etc. use instead simple words of similar meaning.
Avoid second and (especially) third conditional sentences, their logic tend to be very fuzzy.
Avoid passive voice - some languages have no passive voice at all or it sounds very artificial
Avoid compound sentences with more than 2 subordinate clauses - this is real pain in ass when you need to translate them.

"Dear authors of strategy communications and updates,

To help alleviate procedural and operational pressures on community contributors, and enable people to participate in primarily strategic and generative roles, one can expect the lead architect and team will work closely with existing community and staff liaisons in order to produce communication simple enough to be understood by simple Wikimedia project's contributors, users, re-users, and any other potential stakeholders of the strategy process.

If I were you, I would have had used simpler sentences, as then, it would have been higher probability to be understood more clearly by potential, global audiences (such as our stakeholders, various groups of users, re-users, affiliated organizations' members, members of editing and non-editing communities and individuals such as readers and non-readers), however, if you wish to be not understood at all, producing this kind of communication is a good way to achieve it; bear in mind that, in fact, our dissemination of qualitative outputs and quantitative metrics' results of diligent research performed by appointed experts before, during and after strategy process, as well as consultations outputs of various communities (as mentioned already) are not consultative, neither informative at all as long as they are not communicated in understandable language, especially if the primary direction of our focus had been originally meant to be to express ourselves to non-native English spoken audiences or use to be then translated to non-latin languages, especially these having non-analytical syntax, although (maybe, but don't know why), you might consider creating such complicated sentences, as this one, are of use to anyone. I’m genuinely humbled by what it is bringing to the conversation.

This communication to you is actually a mix of copy-paste of fragments of sentences of several former communications, updates, statements and other text, you used to in recent past (and unfortunately, probably also in the foreseeable future) flood many bars of Wikimedia projects, E-mail lists and other communication channels, in hope (I guess) that anyone will read, understand, and possibly positively react to them, which I am afraid is false assumption, due to high level of complexity of your communication and especially language you tend to use. The art of proper communication is rather to use as little as possible words from the set that is widely understood by general audience, you, hopefully, are aiming to reach. We all recognize that our movement, mission, and culture are wonderfully idiosyncratic, but it does not mean that our language should also be idiosyncratically not understandable by each others. One thing my translation efforts allowed me to reflect on is that even with how far this process of language complication has come in a short time, we have much farther still to go before we are fully able to assure that movement of our size in a truly misleading way - or for every corner of our movement to even know this work is not understand by vast majority of users, resusers, readers, non-readers, donators and non-donators as well as any other stakeholders!

Hoping that you may find some day, that, even with non-profit organizations, our commitment to meaningful consultation should, and hopefully would require more understandable and simplified language even if that does not so quickly add many hours to our translational efforts of external experts, paid so easily from our beloved individual and corporate donators' funds.

Truly yours, "

Thank you for participating in the first phase of the 2017 Wikimedia movement strategy process. The text of the strategic direction has now been finalized. New comments will contribute to the next phase of discussions.

Dziękujemy za Wasz udział w pierwszej fazie procesu strategicznego Wikimedia 2017. The text of the strategic direction has now been finalized. New comments will contribute to the next phase of discussions.