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.