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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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:
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?
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.
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…)
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.
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.
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.
I agree with what you said in this comment except for:
This could work simply if there were only one admin and the forum was centered around the languages that said admin could understand. However we have various admins with presumably varied knowledge of different languages.
If a topic were started in, let’s say for instance, Greek. If we have one admin who understands Greek and determined the topic to be suitable, what’s is stopping other admins who don’t understand Greek from deleting it because they don’t understand it. What if it were a suitable topic in a language that none of the admins understood, even if multiple users could? There would need to be a mechanism of communication to prevent wrongful deletion of suitable topics.
I’m with you on critical mass. It just hasn’t been reached. As it currently stands, imo, the system works fine. I even make it a point to look at topics in languages I don’t understand. More often than not, I either learn something, or have something to provide to the discussion.
If we’re routinely participating in conversations in random languages, that reinforces the proposition that Subject be stated in English. I think that might be at least a little help to admins, too.
I don’t think so. As moderator I have to look into a newly posted topic and the comments on it. At least to determin if it includes any links that are problematic or obvious spam.
As a user, it’d be annoying to see a potentially interesting topic and then find that it’s in a foreign language when opening it.
I’m still for having one “International forum” where anyone can post in a non-english language. Preferably by adding a “[PL]” for Polish, for example, as Nerd edited for his threads.
The upside of Discourse is we can have sub-categories of categories that appear in the categories’ list. I.e. we can have an International forum and then an International -> Polish forum, and upon vising the International forum the Polish posts also appear. That way we don’t need to resort to bracket-tagging the titles.
It seems this solution will be the best for now; so I’ll start configuring Discourse for it.
OK. And people posting in a language you haven’t created a subforum yet just post into the International forum directly, and if enough people do that, they get their own subforum?
OK, done. There is now an International category and I’ve filtered the recent Polish posts into it.
As of now there are no subforums; I guess after about 5-10 posts in a short (?) period of time, we can create a subforum.
Posts in it are set to not appear on the main page by default. I think there’s a way users can change this for their own front-page, but I’m not quite sure how…
What you did with ‘international’ and ‘main-english’ is other than english language discrimination. In your view ‘international’ world is subdivision of ‘english’ world? How anlgocentric of you!
There must be ‘main international’ and in it subdivision ‘english’ and ‘german’ and so on.
‘Main international’ must be mix of languages with equal rights.
