Hello everyone
As decided during the summercamp, we are going to announce that the official language is english i prepared a post for social networks, can you tell me if it’s ok for you, if you want to add something else and if you want to translate this in another language, please, feel free to do it
EN---------------
[Announcement ] As the community grows, we are wondering about intercommunity and intercountry communication. To facilitate exchanges, the official language of Museomix will now be English, shared by all, for intercommunities exchanges, working groups and also on social networks !
This solution is not pleasant for me. The last one, when each person writes in his/her own langage + translate in english at least a sum up was better I think. Evenings and nights, when we are tired (so tired), to translate from english every texts, even those wrote by same langage speaking people, is absurd, exhausting and difficult. And, I study at the National Museum of Natural History, I think that biodiversity is important, and linguistic diversity too !!! So I purpose translation in english can become systematic, and for native english people, translation in one langage they choose
waiting for your points of view !
Hello Catherine,
In fact it does not change, as long as there is an English version, even summarized it’s ok it is mainly on social networks that this will change since on the official museomix accounts the language will be English. For the rest, the exchanges, and the working groups, we experienced it at the summer camp, it is better in English (however, we do speak for the moment of franglais, p)
Personally, I’m unable to translate understandably written my remarks and apologize, but it will be Google Translate or anything and I don’t think that’s relevant level result.
Perhaps it is better to split the tweets even if do in English, french, and Spanish so there is something for everyone?
On Facebook, there is nothing like this to put the translation below since we are not limited in number of characters.
The implementation of a translation “Team Traduction” or a table bringing together the people comfortable with the translation (and having the time of course…) could be a plus to translate the productions of communities having greater than the local circulation? "
First of all thanks for your input and @Marilyne thanks for claryifying a couple of things. For the moment we are only discussion social media communication. For decisions about working documents and content, we will organise a workshop at the september Intercommunity meeting in Brussels. As soon as we have something more concrete, I will put it on the Intercommunity drive to which you are ofcourse welcome to add comments and input.
I would agree with Catherine that nurturing a culture of language diversity would be the best-case scenario. My experience at the Intercommunity at Lyon however hasn’t reinforced my confidence that this is feasible in a way that doesn’t reproduce the pattern of prioritising french-speakers needs over other members of our community. If the idea behind the Intercommunity is to create a horizontal, direct-democratic structure, then the priority needs to be inclusivity. I realise that this will require an effort for all of us but our experience in Belgium has thought us that it is worth it and in fact not that hard. We all adapted pretty quickly and it’s no longer weird for us to speak in english.
I also thought of setting up a translation unit. However, I don’t think it will help it we approach this as a time-saver. Because saving time for some people means losing time for others. Moreover, the idea is that all people gradually get comfortable with English, even if the English is not instantly of a high quality it should suffice for communication and organisational documents. In my opinion we definitely need it to rewrite all of our standard documents and content in English and start the translation from there.
Also in Switzerland we have some language difficulties like Belgians and intercom.
The solution in 2015 was to translate all the documents in French and German for Museomix Bern while we mixed the swiss french existing community with the new community, a big work. But for working each team was free to choose the language to use and to save time the “officials” communications where in English.
Last year we make 2 different Museomix, one principally in French, the other in German, but to communicate between the organizers we used principally English.
Also in the Museomix CH association we use a similarly strategy, the statutes are in French while the “head office” is in a French speaking canton, but for exchanges we use English if we now that somebody don’t understand French or German and only the newsletter and the website are translated in French and English.