You might find interpretations or explanations in other languages, but those would of course not be legally binding. Who would be willing to expose him- or herself to the legal liability resulting from a translation error?
I suppose anybody whose English is not strong enough - after all, you need to understand what you are signing, and the chances of getting an erroneous interpretation are far less, if the document is translated by a professional translator, as opposed to yourself having learned English for three years at school a dozen years ago, and currently mostly use it to read comments at Youtube videos.
Legal text is often difficult enough to understand in your native language, and often uses vocabulary which you would never normally encounter in your daily life - even if you used English a lot. Yes, software authors often have strong English skills, but going legal is another matter entirely. As you say, translation errors may cause legal liability. So, failing to understand the legal text, they would rather NOT sign the document, which in turn means no contribution.
Having a native translation and the original legal text side by side would make it a lot more approachable by non-native English people. I know ASF *is* an US entity, but many contributor's aren't. Out of JSPWiki active contributors, only one lives in the US, and we have a lot of users from India and China. I would applaud ways to help these people to get more involved...
I'll also contact legal-discuss on this. /Janne --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
