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I know we are a lot of people from other countries that are not native English speakers (like me, as you can see my English is very poor) that may have a problem with translations. I imagine this could be the case for a lot of people who participate and learn a lot with this amazing site. There is a lot of technical information that can not be found or translated easily.

To address this, is there any way to make a little wiki in order to organize common terminology for newbies in photography like me, separated by language? I'll glad to participate to try to solve this common problem that, of course, is not from the site, but from our global communication :) I know to make a "stack everything for every language" is not an answer, but maybe this could help.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Your english is very good. I know I could not get anywhere near where you have if I needed to work in Spanish (or any other language), I probably would not even consider trying to do something like what you have in another language. But yes I can see the problem that you (and many other people) face. \$\endgroup\$ May 17, 2013 at 6:39

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It's a great idea, but I don't think it's the best for Stack Exchange.

Wiki pages here which have a lot of information are hard to maintain. Our biggest and most successful example is What do all those cryptic number and letter codes in a lens name mean?, and the top answer (while helpful) is so big that it's actually kind of hard to edit.

We don't necessarily have the resources to validate correctness in all languages, and we don't have any commitment to keeping the list up to date.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Is this something that would be better for the blog, or maybe even meta? \$\endgroup\$
    – jrista
    May 17, 2013 at 15:58
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    \$\begingroup\$ I concur with Matt. I'm not really sure how we would ensure that translations of basic terminology stay consistent across languages or that updates to the English document would get carried over, particularly since the setup of SE doesn't really support this kind of thing very well. It really seems to require more of a dedicated Wiki environment with translation as a built in goal to support it. I do wish there was a good way to address this kind of an issue on SE though, I just don't see how it's practical to do so. \$\endgroup\$
    – AJ Henderson Mod
    May 17, 2013 at 16:23
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    \$\begingroup\$ I find it a lot easier to read text in English and to be relatively sure I understand it well enough, than to write something in English myself and hoping not to mess it up too much. I believe this is the common way of how it works with foreign languages. Thus a wiki for English photography terms sorted alphabethically would not be the best for translations. The words of the other language should be sorted, for each different language, and that would require a table with sorting functions for each language. Can't do that here. Plus all those other reasons already mentioned, of course :) \$\endgroup\$ May 18, 2013 at 22:59
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It isn't an ideal answer, but I suppose this could be handled on a case by case basis by term. If there is a particular term that doesn't translate well, a question could be asked about that term. It requires some additional searching by others to find it, but a simple question like "What does Bokeh refer to?" with a side question in the post asking if there is terms in the particular language that might refer to it could possibly work.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ That's exactly in the example what I was thinking about. Bokeh in spanish has too many translation, and the effect can be even confuse with some other effects in spanish. Is really hard to translate it, even the example in wikip! \$\endgroup\$ May 17, 2013 at 16:55
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Leandro - ironically, Bokeh is actually a Japanese word. We appropriated it in to English usage fairly recently. It refers to the quality of the out of focus area in an image or sometimes the out of focus part of the image when used artistically (depending on who you ask). The former is generally agreed to be the more traditional use of the term, but generally people will recognize what you are referring to with either usage. \$\endgroup\$
    – AJ Henderson Mod
    May 17, 2013 at 17:23
  • \$\begingroup\$ wow! good tip, I love this thing because I'm Lingüistic Bachelor (I love verbal and image languages :D) \$\endgroup\$ May 20, 2013 at 1:44

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