Do you think there could be a “Multilingual” category where we could automatically move posts like this?
Many of us can answer questions from people in other languages (I suppose they don’t feel comfortable expressing themselves in English).
5 Likes
I’m not sure I can answer this myself, but I’ve split it off into a dedicated topic for discussion. I believe some of the language communities have their own sites? Were we to do it here, I’d want more than just a dedicated area for “non-English” — I’d want to specifically target the language(s) with dedicated buy-in from each community with moderators and such.
I recently discovered that the @discobot is multilingual and localized for its welcome and tutorial. Perhaps that, alongside the UI localization is what gives folks the impression that this isn’t just an English board?
1 Like
Hi! To find out what I can do, say @discobot display help.
1 Like
I am not aware of Portuguese or Spanish specific forums. Yet I have seen a couple (not much more than that) questions in these languages here. One them was answered, another was received with quite an harsh response. I think for the time being we do not need complete discourse settings for sporadic posts that appear in other languages, but if they get a separate category at least they do not mix with the English threads.
Of course I could help moderating Portuguese and Spanish threads if that was the case. But for the moment I think it is very soon to decide about those things.
4 Likes
I’m part of a Facebook group for Julia in Spanish, but there’s not a lot of action. It would be great if there was a way to manage some of that information here, allowing people to interact in other languages. I’ll also offer to help moderate any forum in Spanish, a discourse.julialang-es.org?
1 Like
Shouldn’t automatic translation services be of some help here? Carrying out the conversation in a thread in a language that not everyone speaks is exclusionary by definition. No matter in which language.
3 Likes
I think we would be dealing with exceptional cases for the moment. Being too strict to the point of completely disallowing people that cannot express comfortably in English is also exclusionary. But I have only seen a couple of posts like that here. My intention was simply to have a clear policy that is gentle to the poster and not polluting to the forum as whole.
1 Like
That is precisely what I’m referring to when I say “no matter what language”. Here the language is normally English, which is obviously exclusionary to speakers of other languages not fluent in English. It may be possible to enable automatic translation via a button in the threads, I believe.
3 Likes
That is one idea if automatic translations are good enough for that (probably they are the future, anyway).
Automatic translation is the obvious thing to do. Any gross mistakes could be easily edited by the polyglot julians.
2 Likes
Hungarian +1
I would like “one” hungarian - general topic about julia - as an experiment ;
imho - it is also good for: organize/coordinate local-community
on the other hand: the automatic translation ( hun<->eng ) is not so good.
1 Like
I think the potential problem here is that as far as I’m aware, Discourse categories and topics are opt out, rather than opt in, and the way you opt out of categories is not obvious. Having a large number of categories for all sorts of different languages might degrade the experience of using the forum for people who don’t know those languages.
I almost feel like unless there’s an easy way to make opt-in categories, it might be better to just have separate forums for separate languages. That of course has it’s own downsides.
Zulip (and Slack) by contrast has a default set of opt-out steams and then the rest are opt-in and can be created by users. So on Zulip, there’s nothing stopping someone from just making a #general-hungarian, #helpdesk-hungarian, #random-hungarian, etc. streams. So perhaps in the meantime Zulip can be a good venue for different language communities?
This would of course pose certain moderation questions that would require some thought, but probably the best approach would just be that if there were big enough communities for a given language, we’d want to recruit at least one moderator who is fluent in that language.
3 Likes
I don’t think it makes sense to create sections dedicated to languages other than English.
For example, in my language (spoken by 60 million people), there are a few sites like this one dealing with school and college math and physics (very popular subjects). They have a few hundred comments per month.
Apart from Spanish, Portuguese and French I don’t think the sections of other languages (like Italian or German) can do better than a few tens of comments per month, let alone the section about Hungarian (Hungary has about 10 million inhabitants, how many program in julia?).
It would also create duplicates of many questions, and in case a question asked in non-English would be interesting, it would still be good to translate it into English to make it available to everyone (and paradoxically the person who asked it does not know English, which means that other people would have to waste their time in translation).
Moreover who wants to do programming and science in general must at least understand a minimum of English.
And I say this despite the fact that I don’t speak English, I understand some written English and I’m not able to write in English, I wrote this post with an automatic translator.
4 Likes
The ubuntu mate community have a multilingual section Multilingual Discussions - Ubuntu MATE Community as a comparison
1 Like
https://julialang.org/diversity/ → "we believe that a diverse community is stronger, more vibrant, and produces better software and better science. "
What is the meaning of the “diversity” - in practice?
Diversity is important and different languages are often a part of different cultures. However, the thing that makes discourse unique is that we have moderators and input from core developers. Unless we can find that kind of support I’m not sure it matters how many speak a given language.
4 Likes
Ideally with automatic translation, Hungarians could keep communicating in Hungarian if they wished to do so, but the majority would not be excluded and would be able to participate in English. There would be double-translation for the supported languages. What is the point of diversity without inclusion?
6 Likes
imho: If we follow the diversity statements recommendations ( by @nassarhuda [1] )
AND We are creating educational material in non-english language ; THEN the next logical step → we need to support this new community members.
My question is: Where ?
- here : https://discourse.julialang.org/ ?
- or We (~ non-english) need to move this new community members to other website?
Adding automatic google translate button everywhere ( juliaLang website / educational material / support forum ) is far from the ideal.
[1]
The word diversity in that context means “avoiding the irrational discriminations present in the culture.”
Having different sections for each language would not promote inclusion but rather promote marginalization.
In my opinion, two distinct things can happen:
1)all posts are translated into all languages, and at this point there would be more translators than programmers on this site;
2) the non-English sections would be less frequented, people writing in their own language would receive fewer answers (of lower quality because fewer people check if the answers are correct) and people who also speak English would write their questions in English for this reason, making the non-English sections even less frequented.
If point 2 were to happen, it would create a marginalized situation exactly as it happens in cities where foreigners stay in the suburbs. This is not a good thing.
Having said that, learning English related to programming is not a difficult thing, I’m learning it by watching subtitled lessons on youtube.
This post was generated with an automatic translator, I didn’t write a single word in English.
7 Likes
3 posts were split to a new topic: Off topic personal commentary