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Sections for other languages

Posted: Sat Jan 11, 2020 9:27 am
by Basslint
What about having sections for other languages than English?

This forum has users from all over the world. Local forums often are doomed to fail, because it's hard to promote them, especially when there is no existing userbase. For this reason, I make this proposal. There are more people who can't speak English than most of us might think; I think they too can contribute.

Re: Sections for other languages

Posted: Sat Jan 11, 2020 9:53 am
by raboof
Basslint wrote:What about having sections for other languages than English?

This forum has users from all over the world. Local forums often are doomed to fail, because it's hard to promote them, especially when there is no existing userbase. For this reason, I make this proposal. There are more people who can't speak English than most of us might think; I think they too can contribute.
I'm not *too* fond of the idea: it will pollute the 'new/unread posts', feeds, and search results, and makes subforums more confusing: if I speak French and English and want to talk about a proprietary sequencer, do I post in 'Sequencers', 'Marketplace', or 'French'?

That said, I'm willing to give it a try. Let's say: if 2 people are interested in a language-specific subforum, I'll create it, and after some time (2 months?) we'll evaluate whether it took off. If it did, we keep it, if not, we retire it again. WDYT?

Re: Sections for other languages

Posted: Sat Jan 11, 2020 12:36 pm
by Basslint
raboof wrote: I'm not *too* fond of the idea: it will pollute the 'new/unread posts', feeds, and search results, and makes subforums more confusing: if I speak French and English and want to talk about a proprietary sequencer, do I post in 'Sequencers', 'Marketplace', or 'French'?

That said, I'm willing to give it a try. Let's say: if 2 people are interested in a language-specific subforum, I'll create it, and after some time (2 months?) we'll evaluate whether it took off. If it did, we keep it, if not, we retire it again. WDYT?
It's a good idea! Although maybe it'd take a bit more than 2 months to build some activity, after all most people here can already speak English so it's more about recruiting new users. Some ideas for making it cleaner:
1) To avoid polluting the front page, they can be put into a "Non-english speakers" section which contains sub-sections for the various languages
2) Language-specific sections can be generic, without subsections. After all, they are expected to have a lower activity rate
3) Language-specific sections can be safely disabled from the new/unread feeds (I think phpBB allows it)
4) Language-specific sections can be crawled safely from search engines if the proper language is set, but if phpBB does not allow it, I think many crawlers can detect different languages at this point. In any case, I am not sure that other languages would prevail over English in most cases

Keep in mind that it'd be for people who can't speak English. So most people would still use the other sections.

One problem of the FLOSS audio programming community is that most people I know are from Western countries (the Americas and Europe). I know there are many Japanese audio programmers for example but I've only ever saw them on Github and maybe on mailing lists. It'd be nice to have them here as well. Or French is an official language in 21 African countries and Canada, and might create a sizeable community. Linuxmusicians in my opinion has the potential to be the global hub that could finally reunite people making music and developing music software from all over the world. I think that more than having people speak their own language, the good effect could be an increase in the number and diversity of Linuxmusicians users - as they certainly cannot decrease :D

Re: Sections for other languages

Posted: Sat Jan 11, 2020 3:11 pm
by khz
I think it good to be able to exchange information in his native language (*1).
How does the moderation in the world language area work? The unlocking of new users for example, I can only unlock the languages ;-) https://www.deepl.com/de/translator.

<EDIT>
(*1) Try to set up an optional extra section for local language, among others as suggested by Basslint, if reasonably possible.
Under the condition that it is technically (php / ...) as well as for moderation (spam / ~friendly tone of voice / ...) easily realizable. Which languages are allowed? Probably all of them? Is a moderator who can speak this language then responsible for the moderation area?
How big is the interest of users (or future users) for such an area?
</EDIT>

Re: Sections for other languages

Posted: Wed Jan 15, 2020 11:16 am
by tavasti
raboof wrote:
Basslint wrote:What about having sections for other languages than English?
I'm not *too* fond of the idea: it will pollute the 'new/unread posts', feeds, and search results
I don't like idea, based on same problems. If there would be some way to 'unsubscribe' some subforums, then this would not be a problem.

I read forum only using 'unread posts' because we already have so many subforums that reading by forum doesn't work for me.

Re: Sections for other languages

Posted: Wed Jan 15, 2020 7:09 pm
by folderol
I can fully understand the desire of this, It must be very difficult for people who struggle with English. The problem is how do you handle the risk of potential fragmentation?

I like to read posts from everyone. Although I can understand a handful of German words (and about three French ones) I would need to use on-line translation services even a sentence or two, a major thread would be out of reach :(

Re: Sections for other languages

Posted: Wed Jan 15, 2020 7:25 pm
by jonetsu
An alternative could perhaps follow this use case: a topic or a reply is found in one of the main sections. But then, a participant would like to express better in his/her own native language. For this purpose there would be a general 'language' section. As a form of a parenthesis. Where some comments could be better expressed for some. But the start point would remain in one of the main sections. Any English user could intervene if he/she notices what looks like an interesting point and asks for more details. Each thread could be prefixed (that requires user participation) by a language descriptor eg.: [ITA] <topic> [FR] <topic> [SPA] <topic> [DE] <topic> [LAT] etcetera (joke, this last one)

For instance.

System Tuning and Configuration

Q: I have problem with sound tuning on ubuntu. Sorry for my English.
A: Do you speak Spanish ? Let's go in the 'language' section and we'll continue there.

Ideally the 'language' section would have a sticky header in multiple languages to the effect that this section is to be used for ...

Just an idea.

Cheers.

Of course, one has to be aware that at least for now, proceeding using another language than English would quite limit the number of possible contributions on the topic. Generous souls could pop back into 'System Tuning and Configuration' to summarize the solution that was discussed.

Re: Sections for other languages

Posted: Tue Feb 25, 2020 8:02 pm
by Basslint
So, I was silent for a while but now I feel like I can speak.

I know a number of fellow Italian LinuxMusicians who'd post here but are kept away by the language. In Italy, knowing English is not as common as someone might think, here is some data:

https://www.ef.com/wwen/epi/

Italy ranks #36 out of 100 countries, but we have a fairly strong free software culture despite that. In fact, there are excellent free software projects out there whose main language is not English, such as the stuff by LinuxMAO (French) or the Ruby programming language (Japanese, but English is also accepted). And I think that has its merits, it helps bring a community together - I bet it has done a lot to help FLOSS spread over to Japan, a country with a lot of great coders.

I think that there is a bias that developers or power users must know English because most technical books and articles are in English. And that bias from my experience as an Italian is not always true.

I think the best we can do rather than wait that most countries improve their English (which might not happen for a number of reasons) is to welcome them as they are and ask bilingual users to be the bridges between communities. Maybe we still haven't found the right way to implement it, but I think we should try to.