My name is Vira, I like to translate
articles in Wikipedia very much.
I think the more information there is in
Ukrainian the better it is for everyone.
Better for me, because I will be
able to go back later
and read something I've never seen
or something I read five years ago,
and then I come back
and it's still present in Wikipedia,
because articles in Wikipedia are saved
as soon as you write them.
And even if I don't have enough skills
to write an article from scratch
because to write certain articles
one needs to conduct a real research,
to write something like
"Art of Mozambique"
one would need to read a pile of books
and write a detailed text.
This is not something I can do,
I'm not educated enough for it,
but I can translate an article
about some well-known person,
contemporary or from previous epochs,
who is famous in their country and has
an article about them in another language.
I work with English, I translate articles
from English to Ukrainian.
And it is, indeed, very interesting.
It requires much less effort
but has absolutely no less impact.
And I know that I can check
the statistics of views for my articles
and see how many people
come and read them every day.
And even if it's one person every two days
I know for sure that my work
was useful to the person who viewed,
who read my article.
Wikipedia readers likely don't read
the whole article from top to bottom.
Very often, when you'd like
to know what a certain thing is,
the first paragraph is enough
to get the general idea.
But even so, when I know
that my work was useful to people,
it is really a very pleasant feeling.
And to make it more interesting to work
in Wikipedia for those who write articles,
I also translate the interface.
I started doing it rather
long time ago because…
Actually, for writing articles
to be a comfortable process,
one has to understand
all the features of Wikipedia.
There are indeed a lot of them:
there are special pages,
there are different gadgets,
tools for writing articles,
for translation, for further formatting,
so that everything looking nice
and pretty, and so on.
And I really wanted that those
who don't know English could do it, too.
And because translating interface
is much easier, in general,
than literary translation, right --
at least, that's what I believe --
so I decided to start doing it.
And there are things which I do regularly.
For example, every week I translate
tech news from the developers
about changes in Wikipedia
during the week.
There are likely some new things that
will be definitely interesting to people,
and they could miss those if not for the
chance to read about them in Ukrainian.
This is true in a broad sense, as well:
the more information
in Ukrainian is on the internet,
the cooler it is.
Because, I believe that everyone came
across a bad machine translation
from another language
from time to time.
This gives bad impression of the Internet,
as a stockpile of information,
where there are no combed texts,
but only some bad stuff.
There more you encounter such things,
the weaker your faith in humanity becomes.
This is why I believe that good texts,
made by good translators,
are indeed useful.
The more diverse information a speaker of
any language can read in their language,
the better, the easier it is for everyone,
the less time this person will waste
again, on translating, for example,
or on looking for the information.
It will be easier for them to spend their
time in good mood for something else.
This is why I believe that those who make
translations are indeed very good people.
Those who make literary translations,
who translate fiction books,
poetry and prose --
they are simply my heroes.
And I am very pleased when I can
translate an article, for example,
about a male or female writer
from another country
and not only translate the existing
content of the article, say, in English,
but also add a line about the Ukrainian
translation of this person's works.
This is actually a great pleasure --
to know that my compatriots can also
read this definitely worthy literature.
And it is definitely worthy:
if an author gets into Wikipedia
it means that they are known
and notable for something.
And when it's available
to read in Ukrainian --
it's very pleasant, indeed.
There is a speculation that the English
language will conquer the world.
Or, that it will be not English,
or another language after it.
This may be Spanish or Chinese
depending on how events unfold.
But whether it will happen
or not -- we don't know,
and saving the languages
that exist in the world
today is actually no less important.
Cultural diversity is feature of humanity
that cannot be overstated.
The fact of how different we are
is very interesting.
Sometimes it's hard for translators
to find an equivalent
to a word or a phrase
in different languages
because there might not be some
cultural concept in history of one nation
which is present in the other one,
and it is very hard to be passed then.
But at the same time these cases are very
interesting because you understand
how different people are, how different
their backgrounds, their stories can be,
nations as well as individuals.
Sometimes when it comes to idioms,
every word combination can hide
almost bottomless deposits of meanings,
of some historical phenomena,
that every idiom can be essentially viewed
as a sort of very concentrated
little history textbook.
I know that not all people
like to talk about language
and follow these phenomena
as much as I do, and this is okay.
Each person has their own hobby,
each person, in my opinion,
has to do what they can do best.
And if they fail a little bit
but really want to do it,
they have to learn and learn more.
And if everyone worked
on what they want and can do,
and if at least some fraction
of this work was useful for all,
then everything would be
great and wonderful.
And also if every person in the world
wrote at least one article in Wikipedia
we'd really have
the sum of all human knowledge.