Translations
English governs. Every other language is a reading aid until it is ratified.
Creative Commons runs a formal translation process across more than thirty languages and treats it as a legal-risk surface rather than a localisation task. A mistranslated obligation is an obligation the reader never agreed to. The policy below is deliberately narrow.
The governing rule
One language decides.
Every instrument states this in its own text, so a reader holding only a translation still learns which text governs.
The English text published at the canonical address governs. Where a translation and the English text disagree, the English text applies.
Two kinds
Official and unofficial, and the difference is legal.
Ratified by the committee
Published at a canonical address under the instrument, carries its own digest, and is version-locked to the English text it was made from. An official translation is never edited after publication, on the same rule as the English.
Zero exist today. The process below is what produces the first one.
Anyone may produce one
Permitted and encouraged. It must carry a notice stating that it is unofficial and that the English text governs, and it must not be published at an openroots.org address or presented as ratified.
An unofficial translation carrying no such notice is a trademark matter, because a reader cannot tell it apart from a ratified text.
Ratification
What an official translation requires.
Four conditions. The third is the one that makes the process slow, and it is the one that matters.
- 01
A named translator with legal competence in the target jurisdiction
A licence is not localised by a fluent speaker. It is localised by someone who knows what the target legal system does with the words.
- 02
A second independent reviewer
A different person with the same competence, who reads the translation against the English and records disagreements.
- 03
A term-by-term mapping of every defined term
Every defined term is mapped explicitly, with a note where the target legal system has no equivalent concept. Attributable revenue, Legal Entity and Compute tier are the terms that break first.
- 04
A version lock
The translation names the exact English version and digest it was made from. When that version is superseded, the translation is marked as translating a superseded version until it is redone.
Jurisdiction
A translation localises language. It does not localise law.
The instruments are not ported to individual jurisdictions. Creative Commons maintained ported licences for a decade and retired the practice at version 4.0 in favour of one internationally-drafted text, because a port creates a licence per jurisdiction and a compatibility problem between each pair of them. The same reasoning applies here.
Where a local legal system reaches a different result on a clause, that is a finding for the errata register rather than a reason to fork the text. Report it at /report.