Forum language

[lelldorin]

I know that for some people of us it is not so easy to write in not native language, but please try to use English in this forum.

[brunobastardi]

why? Sometimes visitors cannot speak Spanish, French or German…
so they are not invited?
No Way lelldorin… is it your forum?
As long there are not thousands of foreign languages…
As long as they do not overcrowd the forum… why not?

[damoklas]

There are people who use computer which do not know English at all or not enough to communicate properly.
There was time when I was such a person, I remember how it is difficult to live in English Universe (in scfi movies even most aliens talk in English).
In my opinion here can be some place for non English speakers.

[humdinger]

If people start threads in a non-english language, I guess it’s OK, as we don’t have any language specific forums. But commenting in another language than the rest of a thread is a bit weird. Just saying…

Another comment was flagged by a user as inappropriate. I can’t say, because I don’t know what’s it about. How should we handle that? Whan there are no modearators of a language, just err on the side of caution and remove flagged posts?

[Pahefu]

From the last forums where threads @lelldorin points indirectly, only a few post have what should be posted, autotranslation by machines to english.

If you cannot translate yourself to english, at least take the bit extra effort of pasting your text in a translator to provide a hint for users that doesnt speak your language, but may speak english.

As an example, i wouldnt answer to a question in german only, but will try to take the extra mile and answer if the post contains english text for me to understand, with a machine translation (whenever possible)

Imagine myself starting to post every code opinion and query in spanish. ¿Estaría bien? ¿Causaría problemas innecesarios? GTrans

[damoklas]

I think posting autotranslations in the forum is a bad policy, why?

1. not all do not understand that language
2. it is not adressed to people who can not understand that language
3. autotranslations are not perfect, and some times even misleading (wrong)
4. there are different autotranslators
5. who do not understand the language, he must make effort to do so (he can autotranslate, learn some language, or ignore)

[Pahefu]

I meant alongside your original language text.

What you state means that a polish asking for support is going to have people speaking (writing) polish to help, whereas that’s a nonsense way of diminishing people who can answer.

If we were talking about polish translation issues, nonworking in polish lang, etc that’s another topic which of course is not meant for foreigners.

Also (3) asking to write in english is not like asking for Klingon nor Esperanto. Amirite?

Edit: isn’t ironic that we posters in this thread, came from countries where english may not be native language?

[donn]

For a question that actually relates to Polish language, for me I would still prefer to see the subject title at least include some text in the forum language (English here), even if the text of the post is in Polish.

If the language makes it impossible for admin to determine whether the post is appropriate, in my opinion, if in doubt it’s OK to assume that it is spam or other inappropriate content, and remove it.

[lelldorin]

Wow, i never wanted to Start a big discussion. I have my own thinking about a forum, it is at the most time a point to take informations. If one visit a forum with many mixed languages he does not find so fast the right aswer. I think English is in the most areas in life the main language teached at scool, so we should use it most times. I am from germany and i have problems to find many times the right words to ask right, but i do it because other can have the same problems.

I do postings in german too, but everty time the title is English and i add a translated Version beside.

Thats the better way? One woman/man translate his own post in english too, or hundreds need to translate before aswering?

[lelldorin]

@brunobastardi

why? Sometimes visitors cannot speak Spanish, French or German…
so they are not invited?
No Way lelldorin… is it your forum?
As long there are not thousands of foreign languages…
As long as they do not overcrowd the forum… why not?

You’re right, it’s not my forum and I do not have the authority to do so but to highlight the negative sides of it should be inside, right?

What would you do if you come to a forum and you find all sorts of different entries in different languages? Right, you would either read only those you understand or leave the forum.

But as you say, it’s not my forum

[damoklas]

I think is OK to post parallel translations in English, but only if you can check the translations accuracy. I am against automatic translations when people posting those without understanding, it can be misleading.

[bullfrog]

I’m native English speaking and have no issues with other languages used for whatever reason. I see no reason to discourage other languages. It was common on the BeShare servers back in the day. I see no reason to stop the tradition of using native language for communication within the community. Of course, English is the world standard for tech discussion. But it shouldn’t be the only language used. I think our community is happily diverse enough to support this.

[waddlesplash]

I think making a “Non-English” category and then remove these posts from the front-page by default would make the most sense. What does everyone else think?

[humdinger]

@waddlesplash

What does everyone else think?

Yes.
I’ve been saying that for a while. This from back in 2012, before we migrated to Discourse, so most of the suggestions in that thread are already implemented:

@humdinger

• International forums I’d suggest to go with German, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish subforums first, all other languages go into the main “International” forum. If there’s much traffic of one language in the main forum, we can offer to open its own subforum. Equally, if there’s no traffic in those default languages, move the threads to the main forum and close it down.
  […]

  International Forum – subforums: German, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish

We should revisit those initial subforums, or maybe start without and see which ones would make most sense.

Should we require that every subforum needs to have an active moderator that speaks the language?

[lelldorin]

@waddlesplash

I think making a “Non-English” category and then remove these posts from the front-page by default would make the most sense. What does everyone else think?

I think it is not the right way to split this forum posts, because informations for users could be hard to find.

[damoklas]

@humdinger

International Forum – subforums: German, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish

Main forum can be international (all languages in a mix, even from subforums), and subforums can be English, German…
This can be done automatically by software, theme creators must have option of selecting main language of the theme, and software must put link of this theme in main multilanguage international forum and the theme in language specific forum.
And, please, do not persecute people of a different language, even if he or she posts something in the forum of a different language.

[PulkoMandy]

Ideally, users could check the languages they understand in some list, and see only matching topics.

• Visiting multiple forums in different languages is a waste of time for me. It would be ok if it was mailing lists, as these are conveniently centralized in my single mailbox. But opening a website, logging in, etc ends adding up to a lot of time spent.
• Restricting to English only reduces opportunity for non-english speaker to join the community, eventually harming our diversity. Even in France, there are some people who could contribute to Haiku if they had docs in their native language, because their English is not up to the task. The situation can be a lot worse in other places. Why do you think we get a lot of GSoC students from India? Isn’t it because english is one of their native languages by now? How many more great contributors would we get if support was available in more languages?
• Mixing everything in a single place is the solution I would prefer for lack of anything better. I can just skip over the polish topics and ignore them. At least try to stick to a single language per topic if possible (and I say that after writing a lot of english messages in the spanish telegram group…)

[General_Edmund_Duke]

@lelldorin

I do postings in german too, but everty time the title is English and i add a translated Version beside.

Well, not always you do that (sometimes you even write in German, while topic has been started in English). So it`s strange that this is you, who feel so bad about that.

I think that topic started in non-English language could be fine without translating, and if someone really need to read it, then google translate can translate a whole page. However I feel strange when I see non-English posts in this forum.

Btw, auto-translators don`t work perfect yet.

[damoklas]

@General_Edmund_Duke

I think that topic started in non-English language could be fine without translating, and if someone really need to read it, then google translate can translate a whole page. However I feel strange when I see non-English posts in this forum.

Btw, auto-translators don`t work perfect yet.

I think that a topic started in non-English may be good without translation, and if someone really needs to read it then Google Translate can translate the entire page. But I feel strange when I look at non-English posts in this forum. : smiley:

In addition, automated translators are not yet operational.

(google translate: english→lithuanian→english)

[donn]

As the saying goes, “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” If there really are people out there in self-sustaining numbers who want to participate in a Haiku forum in, say, Greek, then the volume of posts will warrant a Greek subgroup with its own admin where “Τι συμβαίνει …” will make sense to everyone.

If there are not so many, then no one will come here expecting to find Greek language material. There’s a sort of “critical mass” problem where it isn’t worth checking because it rarely happens, and it doesn’t happen because no one checks. What we’re getting now is the occasional fail. Do whatever you want with them - if it were me (as admin), I guess I’d delete them if I can’t determine whether they’re appropriate to the forum or not.