Continuing the discussion from [Ideas] Why do people not make backups? How to improve that?:
@Melanie please do keep the discussion in English. I apologise in advance but otherwise others are excluded. There is a Deutsch (German) category.
Posting the text in german with a “google translate” associated would be fine, right?
It requires some extra efforts to contribute doing this way, but at least other can read. And as a reader, knowing the English text is a translated text gives hints in case of a weird wording, another translation service can be tried to double check.
What about the translated text in english
(original text in X language)
something something
I feel like the above would be best for readability.
I think both are good, as long as it’s used. It may be hard to make new people aware of this netiquette rule anyway. 
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would it be considered bad practice if a forum member posts a translation of a non English post above in an English only subforum?
Personally, I use translate-shell, I find it more practical and it offers more features.
It’s a command line translator but really very easy to use and you have the possibility to choose your translation engines.
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Adding my 2 cents here: since the conversations in the forum are interactive, I think that using automated translation tools is likely fine.
If that fact can be made explict, even better, but in all cases there is opportunity to ask for clarification if any of anyone’s answer makes little sense (which can/does happen when using automated translation tools).
Even in English, some posts require some back and forth clarification anyway, so I think that using whatever means to understand and help each other is likely to be a good thing.
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Some folks have done this in the past, and I don’t remember any case in which the outcome wasn’t positive.
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(background info: I am an English speaker who is not conversant in any other language)
Personally, I don’t think there is any problem with having a mixture of languages in a single thread. I replied to the post which spawned this topic by using a translate service on my end. I don’t like the thought that people need to be siloed based on which languages they speak. QubesOS users should be one community, not a set of fragments.
Replying in German means that non-German speakers have to do a little extra work, but requiring English means that non-English speakers have to do a little extra work. Either way somebody is going to feel excluded. I feel it is more respectful for everyone to try to accommodate other people’s languages in the same place rather than privileging one language over others.
Just my 2 cents. 
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I think that the majority of people are English speakers, I find it logical that everyone uses this language. I don’t think non-English speakers feel excluded because English is not their “native” language (that’s my case).
In any case, when you do a search on the internet, most of the results are in English and non-English speakers are not excluded from the internet! 
.
At worst, if we don’t find a satisfactory answer because we don’t understand English, there remains the “in your language” (which is not very used, which makes me think that non- English speakers do not feel excluded 
)
(In addition, it helps you improve your English! ahah)
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One trick I use when translating language A (my language, and why the heck don’t you speak it?) to language B (quaint relic)
(I am kidding, by the way)
is to do the google translate from A to B. Then I paste what came back in B, into google translate from B to A. If it doesn’t come out the same as what I put in originally, then google translate made an error somwhere. I can’t tell whether it introduced the error in A->B or B back to A, so I just rework until I get something similar coming back.
It seems to have more trouble with complex sentences than simple ones (no surprise). One time trying to go from English to Spanish I kept getting something wrong (and misleading–actually saying the opposite of what I wanted) coming back, and could only fix it by breaking my sentence up into shorter sentences.
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Well, the usage varies a lot by language. At time of writing:
| Language | Thread Count |
|---|---|
| Chinese | 5 |
| German | 66 |
| Spanish | 9 |
| Portuguese | 7 |
| Italian | 0 |
| French | 19 |
| Japanese | 3 |
| Russian | 9 |
| Indonesian | 0 |
| Korean | 1 |
Considering that German at 66 has more than 3x as many threads as the next most popular (19), it makes sense that the post which spawned this thread was written in German. A plausible hypothesis about forum behavior is that people who primarily speak a different language go to the language-specific section first. If they find engagement there then they are more likely to become more invested in the forum and end up migrating to the main area. If they don’t find engagement then they give up on the forum completely. I don’t think that making the main area multi-lingual would do anything to help with that. I also don’t think that low activity in the language-specific sections is strong evidence that everyone is content with the main area being English-only.
I wouldn’t be so certain about this. It is much easier to find help in English-speaking part of the forum and most widely known translation tools work best when translating from English or to English. I see this as the main reason for the main area being English only: that way, even people who don’t know the language have the best chance to find help.
In addition, English is the most popular second language to learn (I believe that, but you do your own research ofc). That means that the most people who don’t know it can at least read it without the use of tools.
Although quite counterintuitive, these two features of English language make it most useful for most non-English speakers of the forum, and help the least represented speakers the most. It is much harder to translate to Filipino from German in comparison to English.
Replying in German means that non-German non-English speakers will do more work in comparison with replying in just English. By replying in English, amount of work done to communicate is shared between users more evenly, and it is easier for new users (who must carry the burden of figuring out Qubes too) to get into community. Only I will appreciate that because I like German and I study it anyway.
In a way, English works similarly to data interchange formats, like JSON and XML. Even if none of the “programs” on this forum speak it natively, this is the most accessible interchange medium.
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I tend to agree with you @otter2 . It would be interesting to have the opinion of the main stakeholders: the Germans and the mods.
Personally, the structure of the forum suits me like it is but I’m French and not German ahah.
(background info: I am an English speaker as her second language who is not conversant in any third language)
This solely contradicts the goal of the post.
- Let’s transfer this topic to real life, to New York. I couldn’t speak to anyone without my phone, all while I’m in the USA? But, if I go to AOC’s home somewhere in the 14th District for example, I am all prepared to use my phone to be able to understand Spanish, spoken in THEIR home.
- Let’s have 192 languages on the topic. So I have to translate 191 languages, because a person can’t translate to one language?
This is clear example how wokeness is wrong in its comprehension on how to “achieve” equality. By no means, hereafter I refer to the poster from the quote as a “woke” person!
Carry it further. There are somewhere between six and seven thousand languages in the world, though a huge number of those are spoken in places where–let’s face it–there probably aren’t any computers. And many of those languages are on the verge of extinction, their last native speakers failed to pass them on to their children and will die in the next few decades.
I am a native speaker of English (pretty much the generic American variety), and so it seems “easy” to me. Sure we have less of the dross that comes with (other) European languages (arbitrary gender, multiple declensions, case endings that make little sense and are ambiguous anyway, etc.) but our spelling is awful, we still have irregular verbs, and we have so many words with multiple meanings [I was surprised when talking to someone who grew up in Vietnam that that was their major complaint]. And as with other languages there is idiom, you don’t notice it until pointed out. “Look it up”? What does “up” mean here? “Do you want to…”? Precisely what does “do” do here?
Anyhow, I can only imagine how much of a struggle non-English speakers have trying to pick it up.
(And now it appears that every one of my templates needs updating…)
I think you make some valid points but we disagree on values. Regarding your claims, a cursory search backs up the “English is the most popular second language” from some semi-reliable sources, I’ll accept that for the sake of argument. I’m assuming that your claim about translation tools comes from personal experience, I’ll also accept that for the sake of argument (side note: I wonder if translating from Filipino to English to German would get better results than going directly from Filipino to German).
From your post, I am inferring (perhaps incorrectly) that you are primarily valuing 3 things:
- Maximizing the number of people who engage.
- Spreading the translation work as evenly among engaged people as evenly as possible.
- Minimizing the total amount of work that needs to be done in order to translate.
Personally, I think that those are good things to pay attention to but I would also add:
- Accessibility to people who have the most need for QubesOS’s protections.
Note that I am focusing on individuals who need it not organizations who need it. This is my focus because organizations are already able to provide compelling incentives (money) for experts to focus on their needs.
The arguments you present make a compelling case that if we centralize around a single language it makes the most sense to centralize around English.The centralization does support (1) and (3), but at the cost of (2) and (4).
It contradicts (2) because it means that fluent English speakers have to do very little work compared to non-fluent speakers. It contradicts (4) because there is a bias to the people who learn English to begin with. For example, one of the reasons that English is popular is because it is the “language of business”. This means that people who have more status (and therefore naturally have more social protections against adversaries) will be disproportionately represented in the English-speaking population. When discussing usage patterns it’s also worth noting that there’s a survivorship bias to who ends up on the English-speaking section, including this thread.
If we do have separate sections for different languages I would ideally want to see each language have the same level of support that English does. For example, the English-speaking section has separate places for different threads while the language-specific sections are monolithic. I agree this makes sense while participation is low but once participation in a particular language reaches a certain point the subsections become more useful.
I still like the idea of multi-lingual threads. A lot of the biggest problems we are facing (as a species: war, global warming, etc) are either caused or exacerbated by our tendency to see certain groups of people as “other”. Language barriers are one of the most obvious things we use to divide ourselves against ourselves. I don’t think we can solve that problem with one forum administration decision but I also don’t think it’s something that can be fixed with a top-down decree. Which means that we need to take this into account into our decision-making processes everywhere so that a lot of little changes become a big change.
TL;DR
idk m8 going multi-lingual is hard because you need to know all languages in a topic to comfortably read it. No likey.
Long post
We both should've spent our time writing or reviewing code or documentation instead aren't we
Unfortunately, translating twice doesn’t work nearly as well as direct translation, unless direct translation is very bad. It also has higher chance of losing meaning even if the grammar or style is better that way.
The purpose of this forum is to serve Qubes users. I like it when people engage, but I also think that from the perspective of the forum amount of people that engage in a useful way and amount of people who can read are more valuable. Spreading the translation work evenly is nice, but it is not a core requirement. Translation work must be spread in such a way that most people find the forum useful, even if it means that one group doesn’t need to do any work. Minimizing work is generally good, but it may be useful to trade some of the pure efficiency to make forum more accessible.
Yep, I believe that English is the best language for an international platform.
I wouldn’t call it full centralization, since sections in other languages exist. It is completely fine and healthy to have language-oriented versions or sections for other languages, but the central part benefits from staying English (or any other one internationally popular language, like Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, French, German, etc., but IMO nowadays English is the most useful of them).
It is biased toward people who learn English, but I don’t think that it is feasible to not be biased at all. English is a very good choice because:
- English bias harms the least amount of people and helps the most
- It is generally useful to study English if you don’t know it already
I don’t believe that it creates bias towards people with power. You don’t need to be special to know more than one language on the reading level, and many know three or more.
There is survivorship bias. Its just that if we make the main section non-English there will be less survivors, and AFAIK it is hard to support anything other than English, German, and French well (no human resource).
True.
This is kind of rude and unfair, but I would rather coerce everyone into using the main part of the forum (with an aptly picked language) because it creates a “town square” for our community. Making community completely decentralized with equal support will make it more independent and separated. Not cool. Maybe if there are a lot of users, but then we hit major distribution level. I would love to see that day.
I don’t like the idea of multi-lingual threads because its impractical (for everyone). I don’t believe that it has anything to do with our views, but with the fact that it would be hard to read such topic unless you know all languages in it. It might be fair to represent languages in the community evenly, but it cannot be achieved by multi-lingual topics because:
- it doesn’t help with language barriers
- it doesn’t help to introduce more people from underrepresented groups into the community