Skip to content

Official Arabic and Croatian Translations of 4.0 Licenses Now Available!

About CC

Via a milestone translation effort, we are happy to announce the official translation of the Creative Commons 4.0 licenses into Arabic. An estimated 420 million people around the world speak Arabic, the sixth most spoken language in the world, making this translation effort the most far-reaching to date.

The Arabic translation is the result of an unprecedented collaboration among more than a dozen translation and technical team members from nine Arab countries. The translation team consulted with members of the CC community in the Arab world to achieve consensus on technical and legal terms. An online public consultation was conducted from July 12-21, 2016, following a face-to-face working session in Istanbul among several of the team leaders. The public consultation resulted in contributions by lawyers, active license users, linguists, translators, librarians, and representatives of cultural heritage institutions. Blogs, social media and a mailing list were used to inform the translation process. The Arabic translation was funded in part with the generous support of the Ford Foundation and Wikimedia Foundation.

Special congratulations go to Riyadh Al Balushi, Hala Essalmawi, Sadeek Hasna, Pierre el Khoury, and Mohammad el-Said for leading this multi-year effort, together with the terrific support of former CC regional coordinator Naeema Zarif.

The Croatian translation is also notable and expected to have significant impact. While using standard Croatian legal terminology, the translation will not only benefit Croatian speakers, but also speakers of affiliated languages across the Southeast Europe. The CC licenses are used by a range of Croatian-language users, from Wikipedia, various online news outlets, political parties, open access repositories, down to individual creators and users of free cultural works.

The public consultation process took place from January through June 2016. The translation team reached out especially to the IP lawyers, professional translators and the Wikipedia community during the consultation process. Special thanks are due to Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars and Diana Kovačević Remenarić. We want to also thank to Nena Antić from CC Serbia and Ante Jerić for their invaluable help and comments, as well as former CC regional coordinators John Weitzmann and Gwen Franck for supporting the translation.

Please visit our wiki for more details about these new translations. Congratulations to the teams on their work!

Posted 23 February 2017