Am 05.07.2011 14:43, schrieb Marc Zoss:
My aim was to come up with a single draft version to base the entire discussion upon. In order to make the draft readable I made a couple of edits, mainly getting rid of (german-specific) "Bandwurmsätze" and "Substantivitis". Regarding the content, I do not believe that my edits changed anything substantially. At least, it was not my intention to change anything unilaterally.
See my mail to the list on the 30th of June, there is at least one good and pragmatic reason to use a German master version. It could just as good be French, except that it's just not particularly likely that we would want to register with a French speaking trade registry. If money and time are not of any concern, sure lets go with an English document.
But now concerning your specific issues:
- non-commercial vs. non-profit
Original: "Such activities can be of both commercial as well as non-commercial nature. // The Association has no commercial purpose." Edit: "Such activities may include both non-profit as well as profit-oriented ones.//The Association itself is not profit-oriented."
I stumbled across the second part where I found that the para "The Association has no commercial purpose" is rather meaningless and considered profit-oriented more appropriate. For coherence reasons, I then also changed the first sentence to "non-/profit-oriented". You may want to elucidate (i) what "commercial purpose" comprehends, (ii) how it differs from not profit-oriented, and (iii) which is why more appropriate.
There are two issues here
- non-profit is used in colloquial English for a whole class of organisations ranging from simply tax-exempt to charitable (which probably matches best with the Swiss "gemeinnützig")
- non-profit is also difficult to translate, does it mean non-profit as in no profit (which would unduly constrain the organisation) or does it mean not profit orientated as you changed your text to. The later is not really necessary because Swiss associations by definition can not be profit orientated, however they can and very often do, directly represent and support commercial interests of their members. My intention was to make clear that we are not an industry association or similar
IMHO we could simply strike the last sentence of (2) and I believe we should reformulate the 2nd sentence (in the German original) : on rereding it, it doesn't seem really clear that "Aktivitäten" are the activities of the "Projekten, Personen und Unternehmungen". Does anybody have a better suggestion?
- take an interest in vs. participate
Original: "Furthermore, the association can be a member of other organizations pursuing similar goals or take an interest in such organizations." Edit: "Furthermore, the Association may be a member of or participate in other organisations pursuing similar goals."
Bureaucratic language aside, to "take an interest in such organisations" is about as unspecific as it gets and can mean anything (e.g. "we think openmapquest is a good thing"). To me "participate" certainly expresses a specific engagement and is thus more appropriate.
In this kind (contracts, bylaws and so on) of context, I have never seen the phrase used in any other way as a financial stake in a company. You are insofar correct that the German might be to unspecific.
I must admit I do not really care about the seco template. I think what is needed is a readable and understandable draft of the bylaws in order to have an inclusive discussion. Your draft was a first step and I tried to make it somewhat readable. Personally, I would not at all care too much about the translations yet but first get the document's content going.
We could use any other template, however the SECO one is reasonably recent and has other language versions available, which, I hope, are usable. More important it comes from a known and reasonably respected "official" source. As long as we don't stray to far from the original text we should be safe from having to get legal counsel, or having people asking us why we don't get some.
If you do not want to change anything for translation or whatever reason, then you do not need to discuss it at first hand. And another question: Do we really need to re-translate the bylaws?
See above and mail from the 30th, the point of the exercise was not to create the all singing and dancing world moving English language bylaws, I just ran the bloody stuff through google translate and wikified the result so that non-German and French speakers would roughly know what we are talking about (and hope that is good enough for the OSMF).
If some of my edits are not considered appropriate by the interested parties, feel free to revert anything you like.
Not not appreciated, but some of the changes are orthogonal to what I was trying to achieve.
Simon