[Theforum] Re: langs

Warden, Matt mwarden at mattwarden.com
Mon Nov 12 19:43:06 CST 2001


isaac wrote:
>Reread your comment above, but replace German with "PHP" and English with
>"CF" or "ASP".
>
>Think of it as being remotely comparable to CF vs ASP vs PHP lines. 

Yes, *very* remotely. I'm not sure how to even respond to that. I mean, I
can look at CF and understand what's going on, but I've never tried
learning CF. Reading an article in German is nowhere near the same.

>I think we should post it in German and then await a translation. If no
>one volunteers it, then tough.

Well, that's your opinion, but that's certainly not something I agree
with.

People ahve been saying things like "we're fulfilling what we've been
touting all along about being an international community."

Well, yeah, that's nice. But, our community in its *current* state is also
accustomed to the unwritten rule that each and every article we post will
be in English. All of this "they'll get used to it" and "they should be
mature enough to accept other cultures" is completely missing the point.

The members of our community on weo are members because of our
content. If OUR CURRENT MEMBERS can't read our content, then what are they
here for? What will they learn of "culture" from content which they can't
read?

They'll get used to it? Get used to *what*? Skipping articles because they
can't read them? Waiting for someone to volunteer to translate (honestly,
I have a feeling we'll have a big problem getting translators -- and if we
do get a set of "usuals", then we introduce another bottleneck, which was
one of the reasons for the admin->theforum move in the first place).

Isaac, what were you talking about only weeks ago? Ways to increase things
such as comments and ratings, right? How will limiting the audience of an
article to X number of people who can read a specific language help
this?

I really am against not having a primary language on our site. I'm all for
articles in different languages, as long as there is an English
version. Call that US-centric, call that whatever you want. Fact is,
whatever you call that, *that* is what evolt is. If you want to change
that, the change should be a gradual move into translations in other
languages.

Anyways, we can do the line-by-line thing until the end of time (geez,
martin... you even broke up my sentences into subphrases and responded to 
each one of those). I'd rather you just put a notch in the -1 column and
move on...


Thanks,

--
mattwarden
mattwarden.com






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