A translator’s view

Along with my profession of translator for CIAT, I also teach translation and regularly use Wikipedia articles for background information as well as for practicing translation. All written content published on Wikipedia is of public domain and can be edited without risk of violating any intellectual property right.

Wikipedia is now the most widely used source of documentation in the world, with more than 4,200,000 articles in English and more than 980,000 articles in Spanish, and thousands of articles are dealing with taxation, such as taxation by countries, types of taxes, history of taxation, customs and more.

The content is often available in various languages but not always.  For example, an article about a bird will generally have a similar content in English and Spanish, because the object of the study is exactly the same, but it is different for legal and social articles, since they refer to different legal framework and societies.  So the differences between languages are a source of information. Taxation proceeds from this second category. It changes with the countries.

We can always recommend professional CIAT member countries to visit, and if possible improve, the content of Wikipedia articles related to their field, because the published information may be incomplete or poorly presented. Each one of us can edit the articles, and improve Wikipedia information on taxation, since this quality relies on volunteer editors’ competence.

An interesting aspect of Wikipedia is that articles are organized into categories, and these categories change widely with languages. About taxation, a category common to English and Spanish is “Taxation by country” – “Impuestos por pais”. In the Spanish list, 11 sub-categories of countries are currently represented in the articles. In the English listing, 40 sub-categories of countries are present. In Hispanic countries, we can see that Peru and Colombia have their article articles in English, but not in Spanish. By contrast, Argentina and Chile are present in Spanish but not in English. Spain, in May 2013, has its categories represented in both languages. In Portuguese, Brazil has 39 articles on taxation, but no equivalents in English or Spanish. Volunteer translators have plenty of work!

My students and I, we often translate important articles into Spanish or English, contributing this way to develop Wikipedia as well as improving our skills as translators.

In this blog, I can also point out how interesting it may be, in the context of tax education, to increase the quality of the tax information published on Wikipedia, which is today the biggest reference source in the world, with 410,000,000 visitors per month, according to Google. Each item has its own visitor statistics to measure its popularity among Internet users. For example, we can see that the article on Spain’s Tax Agency (AEAT) has received 6,930 visits during the month in April 2013. In the U.S., the article on the “Internal Revenue Service” has received 38,030 visits in April, in its English version. In Portuguese, the article “Secretariat of Federal Revenues of Brazil” received 4,700 visits in April 2013.

The tax issues can be approached from different scopes. An article in English on countries by level of taxation (List of countries by tax rate) has received 70,000 visitors in the month of April 2013. Tax categories are also very successful. For example the article on the Value added tax has received 149,099 visits in April 2013. Its equivalent in Spanish, “Impuesto al valor agregado” has received 84,969 during the same month, but there is a warning that this article needs better references, and the list of countries needs to be more complete. All this can be improved.

Much remains to be done, in Wikipedia, to allow Latin American information regarding their countries equivalent to the one generally presented for OECD countries or the United States and Canada. In my opinion, improving tax information on Wikipedia can also to contribute to reducing the information gap between developed and developing countries, and clarify many concepts. For example, when talking about VAT tax, there should have a specific article for each major country where the tax is present and a general article similar in all languages for the common features of this tax between countries. It is not the case today.

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