Posts written in non-English make me wonder something.
In one hand, it’s great that people not at ease with English can ask questions and get help here, as I see some active and enthusiastic members take the time to translate what they read and reply to provide as much help as they can even though they might not speak the language the post is in.
On the other hand, it makes it complicated for some (well… for me, but presumably some others too) to follow what’s going on these particular threads, and although I could use a translator to have a good idea of the discussion, most of the time I’ll admit I just skip these topics and do not take the time to translate them for providing help or asking questions… boo, shame on me, I know
And I guess browsing the forum for those non-English speakers must be quite complicated as the interface and most of the posts are… in English.
Now, the current way this forum categorizes non-English posts is by usually tagging them with an appropriate tag such as en-español. Which makes it possible for these users to search the forum in their own language, if they know how to do it. For instance:
But once on a thread, the forum is still going to behave “normally” and suggest topics, posts and so on without filtering languages.
I’m not sure if the software used for this forum supports a global language switch that could filter the content by language. This would be a quality of life improvement for some people.
If not, wouldn’t it be more convenient to have a separate forum per language?
Or at least per “major language”, but that would probably be opening a can of worms here and start an endless debate on how many languages and which ones should included, what languages are more “important” than others, etc.
If you browse with Google Chrome, you can turn on auto translate in the browser itself. With that said, it seems like it some times takes a bit to realize a discourse forum is in a different language.
I think that is actually part of the reason why so many people post in their own language. They may not have realized they’re on an English forum and their browser had simply translated it. It becomes extra funny when they quote your English post and the quote is suddenly translated.
Personally I’ve always considered it a little rude to just start talking in your own language on a clearly predominantly English forum. I try to help where I can, but I’m with @Pac, I mostly skip non-english posts.
I’d respond to dutch posts though . But somehow I’m guessing those are unlikely to happen. See:
