Forum language

But it makes contents accessible to more people, those who don’t speak english at all, and improves our diversity, which is a good thing.

Why not? There are more than you expect. Haiku has been localized for some time now and it helps a lot with reaching more users. Some people are also translating documentations (userguide, “learning to program with haiku”, …) to reach more non-english speaking people. This is great and well worth the fragementation.

Also, someone can always reach out to english speaking devs if needed. We already did this in some occasions to solve bugs reported by people who know only russian, for example.

3 Likes

I was meaning that it segregates because of the language difference, i.e. a search term in one language will not necessarily match results for the same issue or topic in another language because the words are different. (And even if it does match, it would need to be translated). So if an issue is solved for speakers of one language, the solution can be inaccessible to users that speak another language.

And what would remedy that? A completely separate forum set up on a different server? Then you wouldn’t even know it exists.
What you get with subcategories is the best we can do now.
Maintaining separate language specific forums doesn’t justify the cost for most languages.

I don’t have a remedy, in fact I totally agree and have never suggested otherwise. Allow me to quote my whole original post. I don’t understand why it is so hard to understand what I wrote, but now I feel I am being misconstrued somewhat.

It just occurred to me that there is an inherent segregation of information by having posts in different languages. People should communicate however they wish. It’s simply an observation. I don’t have any comments or preferences on how it should be implemented or if we just continue as we have been.

Sure, but in a context of discussing pros and cons of a solution it can easily be seen as an argument in the conversation.

You can take it that way I suppose. But taking a wider angle it’s an inherent consequence of any multi-lingual communication, so it will be a problem whatever you do. The only real solution is the babel fish!

2 Likes

Surely this just comes down to whether there are people available to moderate a particular language version of the forum.

This is zoo for noneglishes.

As stated in the other topic, when there are more than 1-2 posts per month in a language, we will add a subcategory for it.

I think:

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.

Main forum must be international with mixed in free way languages, in other word adaptable to needs of the users (like in Youtube comments).

I already explained in the other thread why YouTube comments do not behave the way you seem to expect here, and why making the main forum a mix of all languages does not make sense either. Please respond there instead of repeating the same arguments here.

Anyway ‘international’ is not appropriate term (title) for the section of other than english language (as I understood you want to remove them from main forum, to purify it from non english languages).
‘international’ means “connected with or involving two or more countries” (from english dictionary).
Actualy, it is funny how this term counterparts from different languages is seen, and it means there different things, for instant in russian and lithuanian, than in english. I wonder why can not russians and americans understand each other? One talks about inter-etnicity contacts another about inter-goverments contacts!