User:Habj/Translator questions 1.0

This is a draft of a page that I suggest we create in the main namespace. It is meant to be a forum for translators to ask for clarifications about the text they are translating. Having that on a separate page means that translators to other languages can reuse the information, and actually in some cases it might even become valuable feedback to the people composing the actual definition?

Ideally, the questions in each section should probably be ordered by when the terms and sentences that are discussed appear in the text. Some questions might be more general, I created an "Other" section for those at the bottom.

A couple of relevant questions have been added, so people can see how it is supposed to work. Feel free to answer them, if possible.

Summary

Question: "Free cultural works"

The term "free cultural works" exist in many places of the text, but I bring it up here under the "Summary" heading since that is the first time it appears in the text.

To my knowledge there is no term for "free cultular works" in Swedish, and so we'll have to boldly invent one. To create a good term, we need to understand the background of the term better. Does it mean "free works in the field of culture"? If so, are there other kind of works that are not cultural works? Does it refer to "Works within the Free Culture Movement"? Are the works free in some cultural aspect? (I probably seem pretty stupid here, but I am basically trying to mention all the possible meanings and origins of the term that I can come up with.)

A related question, maybe less relevant but still good for the understanding of the concept, is how free cultural works relate to free software. It seems you include software in the defintion, so the assumption I started out with - that the name was picked to distinguish between free cultural works and free software - seems false. It looks pretty evident from the definition, but I would still be happy for a confirmation. // habj 03:02, 24 February 2007 (CET)

The definition should essentially encompass all information artifacts. The word "free" should be translated to the adjective for "freedom", if that is different from the adjective for "gratis." If there is a literal translation of "Free Culture" that works, this should definitely be alluded to in the name of the definition, but otherwise, you should try to find something that seems the most appropriate to you.--Erik Möller 21:02, 28 February 2007 (CET)

Versioning

Question: hypothetical licenses

A minor release is made when the text is modified in ways which do not have an impact on the scope of existing or hypothetical licenses covered by this definition

Will there be hypothetical licenses covered by the definition and are there any examples of situations when that would happen? The translation of "hypothetical" seems obvious, but to be sure I have to ask. //StefanB 22:27, 23 February 2007 (CET)

The point of this statement is to deal with changes which would have an impact on licenses that reasonable people might come up with in the future. For example, if we stated that certain anti-DRM restrictions are too broad and not permissible, then even if no current license implements such measures, the change would be considered major.--Erik Möller 21:05, 28 February 2007 (CET)

Other

Question: Links to Wikipedia articles

The original contains a link to English Wikipedia, license (piped to display the text "free license") i the section "Preamble". This strikes me as funny since this wiki contains a page licenses; it is linked in the summary, piped as "free licenses". If the text will contain links to English Wikipedia - what do we do with those when translating the text? Do we keep the link to enwiki, do we replace it with a link to the corresponding article on svwiki? If this article does not exist, do we just leave the link out? The first alternative means we provide English speaking but not Swedish speaking information, and the translation exists mainly for those who are not good in English. (In this case, there is not corresponding article but I think the problem should be discussed on a more general level.) An article on svwiki might be informative and contain roughly the same info as the one on enwiki, but maybe not - so the second alternative is a probably loss in information, and maybe even adding bad information. The last alternative is a simple loss of information.

A related question: are we as translators free to add links to Wikipedia articles to explain concepts in the text that they feel needs explaining? What concepts needs an explanation might well vary between languages. In this case, one translator added a link to the article copyleft on Swedish Wikipedia, in the section "Permissible restrictions", and to reverse engineering in the section" Defining Free Culture Licenses".

If we should not add links in this way - could concepts like copyleft be explained on this wiki? // habj 02:41, 24 February 2007 (CET)

I'm afraid you've found a minor bug - the sentence with the link to WP was left in this shape after some refactoring of the preamble. I've changed it in the unstable version, will probably update stable shortly. I suggest that if you want to add explanatory links, you also add them to the unstable English version now, so we can add links around the same concepts in the translations.--Erik Möller 21:10, 28 February 2007 (CET)