It’s not that I disagree with you, Arsène – because I don’t, and I actually identified this as a barrier to participation in my earlier email – but I don’t think it is helpful to flag this obstacle if the NCSG responds to the consultation. My feeling is that this is a known hurdle which cannot easily be addressed until machine translation advances to a satisfactory standard. This is a painful reality because linguistic diversity is very important. But like it or not we are constrained by resources and so we need a common language. English has become the lingua franca of Internet policy; maybe it shouldn’t be, maybe that should be Portuguese or French another tongue, but it is. So in theory we could keep ICANN’s language services team very busy translating all the traffic on the fellowship mailing lists and Facebook groups, helping break down barriers to participation, but given ICANN’s website is barely translated into languages other than English, in practice I think we need to make better use of their time. I think it’s quite reasonable to expect that all public-facing documents are translated by ICANN into the seven official languages. Maybe more face-to-face sessions and working group calls should have simultaneous interpretation too. And I would like all sessions to have live captioning. But I respectfully submit that this is not a discussion for the renewed focus of the Fellowship programme. - Ayden
On Wed, Jun 15, 2016 2:15 PM, Mamadou LO [log in to unmask]
wrote:
Ayden Férdeline |