On 2013-10-02 6:23 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
On 27/09/13 07:26, Francesco Lodolo [:flod] wrote:
Mozilla manifesto is currently localized in 35 languages, do you expect
these locales to follow the same principle you're applying to en-US? I
could be wrong, but for most of them that's not going to work. The
result will only be less clear messages that won't fit in the 140
characters limit anyway.
I think the answer probably is that the translation should prioritize
accuracy over length.

I fully support that, but we are in an exercise here to do the opposite for english Twitter users; prioritizing length while puzzling out how to best maintain accuracy.

So, here's an idea: let's treat "Twitter English" like its own language. What we're trying to build here, then, is a translation effort rather than a rewrite.

Some of you have heard me going on about this already; I think that modifying the manifesto to fit the arbitrary constrainst of a proprietary service is not the right thing for a lot of different reasons. Mitchell's reply, though - that she "would publish the manifesto as a pdf doc or other formats if that meant people would see it and start to think about it" - is a strong argument, as is the implication that a document has to be accessible to be relevant.

I think if we were /only/ publishing the Manifesto as a Word document that would be one thing, and I'd go back to looking for a flag to hoist and sand to draw lines in and so forth. But if we keep the original, time-tested and Web-accessible Mozilla Manifesto proudly as-is while providing the best possible translation for other formats, languages or contexts, Twitter included, that's another thing altogether.

And yeah, in my opinion we should definitely do that.



- mhoye
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