Re: [ga] LatinoamerICANN publica versión en españolde los Estatutos delI

On 17-mrt-04, at 15:27, Dave Aronson wrote:

> >   Well sorry again Dave, but you are still mistaken.  Most of the UN
> > General Assembly delegates are english speakers and all while in
> > the general assembly meetings have real time translation capability
> > both ways...
> That was part of my point.  To recap, it is basically threefold, and I
> think we're almost fully in agreement:
> 1)   Unlike the UN delegates, we (IETF, ICANN, etc.) aren't in a
> profession where one could reasonably expect us to generally be so
> proficient in so many foreign languages, that we could be expected to
> read a given language, even a fairly widespread one like Spanish.
Actually you are in fact describing the current situation, except that 
there is only one language we are all expected to be proficient in: 
English.
> 2)  The exception to #1 is a very basic proficiency in English (even if
> with a heavy accent, limited vocabulary, and bad grammar and spelling),
> since it is the lingua franca of today's world, especially in computers
> and business.
I don't think it makes sense to start defending English as a choice. 
Yes, many people speak it, but even more don't. English has 
particularly hard pronunciation, spelling and vocabulary. If this were 
a matter of choice, it would make all kinds of sense to choose 
something other than English. But the fact of the matter is that all 
IETF and nearly all related I* business has been conducted in English 
since inception, and changing languages now is infeasible.
> 3)  We don't have anywhere near the money to do all the translating the
> UN does, let alone distributed in real-time like they do.
This is certainly true for the IETF, but not necessarily for the ICANN 
or the RIRs. Also, the situation for all of these is different. I 
strongly believe even assuming limitless budgets, the IETF should use 
just one language. We have trouble enough making clear standards 
documents in a single language that all IETF participants understand. 
Consider the situation where I write a draft in Dutch, it is translated 
into English and then the English version into Japanese, which is then 
implemented. Learning English all around is much more effective.
However, the RIRs and ICANN deal with the public at large to some 
degree, and in many parts of the world it can't be assumed that said 
public universally speaks English. This is especially true in areas 
where there is another "big" language such as in Latin America 
(Spanish) and Asia (Chinese). (Although I believe China has as many 
ISPs and domain name holders as, say, Luxemburg, so using Chinese would 
probably not make much sense.) So if LACNIC accepts IP address requests 
in Portuguese and Spanish, and I can deal with the new ICANN office in 
Brussels in Dutch, that would be just fine. On the other hand, there 
are way too many languages in the world to be able to deal with every 
interested individual in their own language.
But policy matters that go beyond an office or RIR region should be in 
English to avoid problems. Note that address policies by definition 
have global impact, as all those prefixes must be stored in routers 
worldwide, which is something the RIRs don't seem to realize when once 
again decreasing minimum allocation sizes.

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