[PC-NCSG] Comment on Draft Operating Plan
Edward Morris
emorris
Tue Jan 6 06:59:46 EET 2015
Hi Rafik,
- thanks for this. I sent previously a note to ICANN staff responsible for
this public comment regarding submitting late within next days. I would
welcome adding some comments to the statement and updating it as a SG
submission.
- at Amr I think that will be your first call as PC chair :)
Happy to help anyway I can.
- As a small comment: as I am a non-english native and expressing a
controversial position here , I am cautious about multilingualism in
inflating number. I am worried that can end up as a trap of not real
engagement and instead encouraging a form of ghettoization, creating a
dependance or worse being just a PR for ICANN. as arabic speaker, I see a
lot of material translated in arabic language but I have no evidence that
such measure improved the number of participants beyond the usual suspects.
another form of trap would be conflating internationalization with
multilingualism.
Interesting. I've had a very different experience, one rooted both in law
and in the accession of the Nordic countries into the European Union.
During the elections in the mid 90's there was no guarantee Swedish and
Finnish were going to be used as official languages in the EU. It was felt
that, heck, all the Finns and Swedes speak English, why bother? Well, in
order to win the election the pro-EU folks got a commitment from the EU that
the two Nordic languages would be made official languages. Once in the EU
our libraries were flooded with EU materials in English, Finnish and Swedish
(the later two being the official languages of Finland). The English
materials would usually arrive first but I noticed my friends, mostly
educated English speaking Finns, would wait for the materials that arrived
later in Finnish. It was just more comfortable for them.
I have a confession to make myself. Although a native English speaker I
prefer to write in Swedish. You may notice someday that when I'm taking
notes at an ICANN meeting it will be in Swedish. I'd certainly like some
Swedish language materials. I can operate in both languages but the Mayor of
Rovaniemi, a friend, does not speak English. Only Finnish. Should he not be
able to access basic ICANN documents in his native language?
Most of the world does not speak English. All of ICANN must. The most
popular language in the world is Mandarin yet ICANN couldn't even get
Peter's name spelled correctly in Chinese characters on the ballot in the
recent NCUC EC election. That bothers me.
I know there are cost issues involved. Yet if the EU can operate in 24
languages is it unreasonable to ask ICANN to produce most documents in 10
and basic documents in as many languages as possible? Think of children
doing research on the internet. Shouldn't ICANN strive to have a page or two
or three online in their own language explaining what exactly this ICANN
thing is about? Are we sure there are not people who don't get involved
precisely because of the language issue?
I'd be interested in knowing the perspectives of others.
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