Hot on the heels of the announcement a few weeks ago of new Japanese and Māori translations of our 4.0 licences, we have another new Asia-Pacific translation to celebrate – Bahasa Indonesia. Even more exciting, this time the translation team has gone above and beyond to complete a companion project – a Bahasa Indonesia translation of Open Content – A Practical Guide to Using Creative Commons Licences, creating a local how-to guide to go with the new licence translations.

With approximately 42 million native speakers and about 260 million speakers in total, Bahasa Indonesia is one of the world’s most widely spoken languages. The official translation of 4.0 was undertaken by CC Indonesia’s Alifia Qonita Sudharto, with supervision from Project Director Ari Juliano Gema and assistance from the Wikimedia Indonesia team. The translation process began in January and after a fairly quick and non-controversial drafting and consultation period went live on Wednesday.

The translation was relatively easy and uncomplicated compared to other 4.0 translation efforts. This is partly because of experience gained by the team translating the 3.0 licences, but also because more and more Indonesians are becoming familiar with the content and purpose of the licences. This sped up the drafting process, as everyone began on the same page, making language approval much simpler right from the start. This compares to the 3.0 process, when the debate started with whether “law firm” should be translated as “firma hukum” or “kantor hukum” in the preamble and continued throughout the licence. For 4.0, the team was able to focus on substantial matters such as the decision to translate “Similar Rights” as “Hak-hak Serupa”, rather than “Hak Terkait” which literally translates as “Related Rights”.

The team decided to build upon this growing local knowledge by ensuring there was a good guide for those wanting to take up the licences. Rather than writing their own, they chose to translate an existing resource that already had a strong reputation for being clear and thorough. This led them to Open Content, a joint publication of Wikimedia Deutschland, the German Commission for UNESCO and the North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Centre. To further help to build local knowledge resources, they have also created a Bahasa Indonesia infographic poster which explains the difference between copyright, patents and trademarks for Indonesians.

Wikimedia Indonesia will proudly host an official launch of the new licence translations and the two new publications at their Jakarta office on 15 August.

Congratulations to the translation team for completing not one but two difficult translations, and for coming up with such an amazing initiative to encourage local understanding and uptake of CC. We can’t wait to see the resulting growth in open resources in Indonesia.