The first official translation of CC0, into Dutch, is now published! Congratulations to CC Netherlands and CC Belgium, who collaborated on the work.

This is not just the first CC0 translation—it is the first official translation of any international CC legal tool. Under CC’s new legal code translation policy, translation teams work closely with CC Legal to create official linguistic translations of the original English text. These translations are equivalent to the original English: when you create or reuse a CC0 work, you may now refer to either English or Dutch. (You can read more about official translations in our new FAQ entry.)

We are excited to mark this event. CC0 and the 4.0 licenses are designed to be as fully international as possible, and to support that goal, they should be available in languages everyone reads. (Ported versions of 3.0 and earlier have generally been published in the official language(s) of the appropriate jurisdiction, but the ported licenses are not equivalent to the international licenses and may not be substituted as references.) Working with our affiliate teams to produce official translations is a detailed, painstaking endeavor, involving a lot of correspondence on precise word choices, and the first teams have been tremendously helpful to us as we developed the process. There are several teams currently working on more translations of CC0 and the 4.0 licenses, so look for more announcements in the coming months.

CC0 was launched in 2009, and is designed to allow creators to dedicate their work to the public domain by waiving all their copyright and neighboring and related rights in a work, to the fullest extent permitted by law. If the waiver isn’t effective for any reason, then CC0 acts as a license granting the public an unconditional, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use the work for any purpose. CC0 has been adopted widely by institutions, governments, and individuals for data and other material that can be freely reused without restriction.

All language versions of CC0 now indicate that official translations are available.