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