Suggestion About International Forums

[SnowBall]

Hi, I was reading through the international forums and I found it very incontinent if you can't understand anything while having to rely on Google Translate. Is it possible to set your language to something for example French, and the whole forum becomes French, regardless of that the language the poster posted in. Or I can change it to Russian and making everything Russian, and same thing for Spanish, Italian, German, Chinese, Japanese or plain English. I know this sounds impossible but it makes life easier as we all come from different countries and speak different languages (I guess that is the reason for those international forums). Without the *vast majority* of people understanding the what is being posted in those forums, it defeats the whole purpose of having them at all.

This only a suggestion, so don't take it seriously if it is very hard to achieve if possible.

Regards,

SnowBall

[mooms]

Machine translation is not very good.

[NIM]

Yeah, I thought about that before but it is hardly achievable. I will consult with Jan to see if this is possible.

Initially, this was an English language forum, but users asked me to created the International part of the forum where other languages could be used.

[SnowBall]

Sure, thanks. I can only read/speak 3 languages and English is my main one. I don't know about other people but by the look if it, there is not much native English speakers here and it would be convenient to support their language. I can't read Italian for example and it is very annoying that you have to manually Google Translate whenever you visit another thread.

You are saying that it is initially an English forum, then it would be good to tell the users to translate whatever they post in the Non-English sub-forums for the sake of *us*. I am pretty sure the Turkish forum was added somewhere in 2008.

Regards,

SnowBall

[mooms]

I read French and English, and I prefer reading English than a badly translated text in French.

For the international forums, just consider they are an other forum, I don't go in Turkish or Italian section, only French and English.

 

[SnowBall]

Actually, sometimes the info provided in those forums are worth reading. Your first language doesn't mean you prefer everything in that language. I can't read Turkish, Italian Spanish nor Dutch, makes things harder.

If I only understand Arabic and not any other languages, then I will have to rely on Google Translate. Google Translated text is much better than guessing for the meaning, right?

Anyway, I know that it is pretty hard to achieve that and I don't know much blogs or forums offer this except for big companies or government ones.

Regards,

SnowBall

Edited February 28, 2019 by SnowBall

[NIM]

Maybe we can ask users from the International part of the forum to be more active in the English language part of the forum if possible. I am sure that most of those users can write in the English language.

We can create an announcement in each International forum calling users to switch to the English part of the forum.

[Jan Krohn]

 

Yeah, I thought about that before but it is hardly achievable. I will consult with Jan to see if this is possible.

I've seen it on other forums and sites. There seems to be some component by Google to add a language switcher to websites. I've never researched that, as @mooms said correctly, machine translation is not very good.

Besides that, if people switch the forum to their own language, they might tend to reply in their own language, which would lead to great confusion.

 

Maybe we can ask users from the International part of the forum to be more active in the English language part of the forum if possible. I am sure that most of those users can write in the English language.

We can create an announcement in each International forum calling users to switch to the English part of the forum.

This is a good idea. I'll announce that it in the French, Italian and Spanish forums. For the Turkish, Dutch and German forums, I don't think it's necessary at this point.

[mooms]

That seems reasonable, I already post my creations in both English and French section

[Jan Krohn]

 

That seems reasonable, I already post my creations in both English and French section

That's even better than just being more active in the English forum.  

[SnowBall]

True, I am pretty sure most of the people here can understand English and it is good to post in English. For users who just can't understand English, they should at least Google Translate it and post in the English forums. I think the International forums belong to people who have projects in their language, language packs and questions about that language (text encoding and etc. that requires people to understand that language). It does not really belong to normal discussion and postings if the English forum covers it all.

 

That's even better than just being more active in the English forum.  

Well, it could depend, say I have a French project and a question about Office 2010 French and I post it both forums, it would be double posting and spamming to a degree. What should be posted in both forums is Tutorials and Guides (e.g: How to install Windows 10 French in the French forum and How to install Windows 10 in the English forum) and other stuff where it is necessary.

Regards,

SnowBall