Process: Language Barriers and Consensus : IMC Print

Well, we've put out seven issues of the weekly PDF so far, and it seems as though a lot of people have been pleased with the general quality of the content and presentation. The issues have been distributed in South and North America and Europe. People are learning new skills (layout, editing, etc.) I believe we should all be proud of the work we've done so far.

Still, we have some issues to work out, foremost among them Process and Language.

LANGUAGE:
Almost all the discussion that takes place on this list and in our IRC meetings is in English. This leaves a lot of people out. This means we miss out on important stories going on, especially in the Global South. There has been talk of establishing a Latin American PDF, too. Perhaps that's the best solution. If so, I hope there will be overlapping membership between the two working groups. Speaking as a resident of the Imperial North (specifically the U.S.), I would like to help educate people here about issues and events in the Global South (and in impoverished Northern neighborhoods), and that is a big part of my own interest in the weekly PDF project.

I hope we can figure out how to work better across language barriers. Does anyone have any ideas?

PROCESS:
Many Indymedia activists, myself included, are great believers in the Consensus decision-making process. We feel that the only way to resist corporate/nationalist/etc. power is through creating non-hierarchecal, non-authoritarian, non-elitist organizations. These ideals emerge from many different sources, including the Quakers and Anarchism.

"Process" is at the heart of Consensus. Processes separate work from personalities. With effective processes, no one group of people are stuck with all the work (or can take all the glory). A Process lays out ways to accomplish a task, and roles for people to play, and different people can step in or out as they have time and energy. With the weekly PDF, once we have some processes established, it won't matter so much *who* is involved, as long as everything is happening.

So far, we have no "official" process(es) for creating the weekly PDF. So far, we have a few methods that we've been trying out, and adjusting as necessary. The process, in other words, is still wide open. If someone asks, "how do we do [blank]?", an honest answer is, "*So far* we've been *trying* this. But that can change."

It is up to us as a group to decide how set-in-stone we want our processes to be. There are several propositions and resolutions that have floated through this listserve, and which have been posted to print.indymedia. I don't know how we will decide which ones to adopt, or how we will decide whether to adopt them. I suppose that will be an ongoing process.

What do folks think? What ideas do people have? We are doing well so far; let's find ways to keep that up.

on this glorious wednesday i was able to acquire l&h's simply translating deluxe; i haven't been able to try it out so far but according to the promo it's supposed to make translating all kinds of documents quick easy and fun ;); these are the supported languages:
Albanian
Arabic
Bulgarian
Chinese -
Simplified
Chinese -
Traditional
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English (UK)
English (US)
Esperanto
Farsi
Finnish
French
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hungarian
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Latin
Latvian
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
(Brazilian)
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovak
Spanish (Castillian)
Spanish (Latin
American)
Swahili
Swedish
Tagalog
Thai
Turkish
Ukranian
Vietnamese
Yiddish Zulu

this might make it possible to provide translations(for example digests of weekly list emails or something) in more languages "assembly style".
i probably won't have the time to take this on myself due to more pressing duties, however, but i'll ask around confidentially in the translator's elitist crapworkers club:).

so you suggest using bankrupt soft instead of free soft :-))))))))

it could be a good idea. we can test it for fun. If it's a bit accurate, we can use it to create drafts for us ? (so like we have e.g. sebastians article translated on the fly so we can discuss it ?)

Besides barrier language, there is also a technological one. Too often, people are denied access to a web site. Adding insult to injury, one must clog its hard disk with unnecessary files, and must use this or that software. My grief here concerns the use and abuse of PDF.

Why do so many people (even in organizations that "resist corporate[...] power") insist so much in using proprietary software from Adobe, Macromedia, Microsoft, or else? I would like to know why, and understand the logic.

For what it matters, HTML __is__ THE ideal format for documents, especially for those picked up on the web. HTML is genuinely FREE SOFTWARE, standardized, very straightforward, and does not take any room on _any_ computer. You can pick up the browser of your choice among dozens in order to read HTML files, even under non-graphical/windowed environments --which is not possible with PDF.

A- Technical drawbacks with PDF files
-------------------------------------
1. Purpose of this software is to make sure documents are correctly printed, nothing else. You may have noticed that PDF pages fit well on a piece of paper, not on computer screen. Most PDF are painful to view on a must-be graphical display. How many people are you leaving out because they don't match YOUR technical specifications? It is like you do not know a thing about [web] accessibility and usability. Moreover, not everybody may wish to print out a PDF file.

2. For MS Windows, the most recent version of Acrobat Reader is over 8 MB. For people in countries where Internet connection is expensive and not stable, and computers old (because ONGs have given away old xx486 with 14.4 K modem), it is totally unthinkable to download the software. Unless you promote PDF by giving away Acrobat Reader (and 7 floppy disks), but then, is it your job?

B- Inconsistencies
------------------
1. Overcoming language barrier does not make sense when you cannot get into a PDF file.

2. So much for "non-authoritarian, non-elitist organizations". (I will definitely resist any kind of technological fascism.)

In conclusion: Keep as an option the download of PDF files. Do not prevent people from using the Internet the normal way. Then, you can seriously think in overcoming the language barrier.

Firstly I'm glad people are recognising the problem. My suggestion is that we avail of a neutral, regular, easily learnt language designed for international communication. Esperanto is the main candidate.

See the Brazilian IMC page, which has an Esperanto section.

I'm willing to help if this is going somewhere. I'm not willing to help in methods of international organising / information dissemination which promote or collaborate with the linguistic imperialism which has most of the world's languages at death's door.

Unue, mi gxojas ke homoj agnoskas la problemon. Mi proponas ke oni profitu de lingvo neuxtrala, regula facile lernebla celita al internacia komunikado. Esperanto cxefkandidatas.

Vidu la pagxon SCA Brazilia, kiu havas Esperanto-sekcion.

Mi pretas helpi se tiu progresas. Mi ne pretas helpi internaciajn labormanierojn aux diskonigmanierojn kiuj antauxenigas aux kunlaboras la imperiismon lingvan kiu metas la plimulto de la mondaj lingvoj je sojlo de morto.

Daithi

As a linguist "wannabe", I totally disagree with the idea of resorting to Esperanto. The ideological basis that led to its implementation by the end of 1800 were quite "democratic", but all in all it proved to be an artificial language which doesn't work as properly as natural languages do. And anyway, remember that its vocabulary is mainly built on Latin (language of ancient Empire). It can be easy for a neo-latin public (by the way I am Italian), but those who don't speak Spanish-portuguese-italian-french-rumanian should learn another language all the way. So we wouldn't go that far...
I think a translation list like those existing for other projects should work fine here as well, using English as a lingua franca and translating in all possible languages.

All this flowerly language from Portland, which, unlike most PDX's, keeps its list archive secret and has a long list of disillusioned, censored individuals - Andy Rice, Will Seamen, David Stein.
"We won't be fooled again".