Legion World Forums LEGION WORLD Science Police Headquarters Foreign Languages

Do you guys think it would be wise to create separate forums for musings about the Legion in languages other than English?

We have many Legion Worldlers from non-English-speaking countries, and they (we!) seem to enjoy posting here. But there are many people who just don't speak English well enough to participate in Legion World regularly. Perhaps adding Foreign Language Forums would enable them to do that. I don't know how much traffic there would be in those forums, especially in the beginning, but with a little publicity perhaps they could be viable... And English-speaking Legion Worldlers could benefit, too, I'm sure many people would like to have places to practice their knowledge of foreign languages.

So, what do you guys think?

I can discuss it with Scott. But I just cleansed the board of lesser used forums. I'm not sure I'm up for adding anymore anytime soon.

You could try to gauge interest-- maybe headline a thread on the MMB: "Legion World: Now en Espanol!", and see what kind of participation it gets.

Auf deutscher Sprache? I could use the practice.

One forum at first, perhaps, if this is done, with the language of each thread prefixed in the title in English. Such as: [Spanish]

On the other hand, that could be done by individual thread in the existing forums, as well, and as Pov suggested.

I would go with Pov's suggestion of headlining a thread or two in a different language and see how much serious participation it gets. Not that a lot of the participation around here is serious.

And if we do create a forum what do we call it? The Universal Translator?

Hm, I don't know, it would probably be quite difficult for people who don't speak English to sift through a lot of English thread titles, if it was me I'd get bored very quickly (just imagine looking for single threads in English in say a Hungarian website. I'd find that very irritating). I still think a single place with all the threads in a particular language would be better. But yes, there's a concern that the traffic would be too low...

Und ich wusste gar nicht, dass Du Deutsch sprichst. Woher? Hast Du mal in Deutschland gelebt? Oder hast Du vielleicht Deutsche Vorfahren? Mein Deutsch habe ich in Kolumbien gelernt, ich war dort in einer Deutschen Schule, und so ist Deutsch, nicht Englisch, meine zweite Sprache.

Toll, das ist aber eine Ueberraschung! Was man nicht alles ueber anderen Leuten hier erfaehrt...

Juan

I think that when you take into account that the fact that we just combined the creator forums to alleviate some diagnostic problems we were having, turning around and creating a bunch of new forums at this point might just defeat the purpose.

How about headlining some alternate language threads in some of the existing forums, and then perhaps we could re-look at creating new forums after we get our own server down the road? Perhaps if we get into a more stable hosting environment them numerous forums won't be as big of an issue.

I know very little about computers, but if these foreign language forums are going to cause problems to the running of Legion World, they are clearly not worth it. Maybe it would be best to keep the idea in the back of our minds until it becomes feasible?

Juan

That's an interesting idea, Juan - I'd go with a headlined thread for now to guage interest and participation.

One thing we did when I worked in Quebec... a lot of people could understand English (or French, if we were dealing with Toronto) well enough to follow conversations or read, but writing in the other language was another matter. Consequently, meetings, reports, memos would sometimes run in the two languages.

So maybe here you could have a Spanish thread, with English responses permitted for those who can read but not write the language? It could add to the traffic....unless it became a predominantly English thread, defeating the purpose.

(I'm just assuming that Spanish is the most likely second most common language here.)

Maybe with the new Flag feature we can better gage just how international our membership is and what actions, if any, we can take to be more inclusive.

A foreign languages forum sounds interesting. But do we have enough knowledgeable posters to moderate it?

Ich bin Greybird nicht, aber ich habe deutsch auch gelernt. Ich studiertete deutsch beim Universitaet im Vereinigten Staaten, obwohl ich habe die Sprache nicht fuer vielen Jahren benutzt. Mein deutsch ist ein bisschen rosten lassen, ich denke.

Deutsch ist dein zweite Sprache, anstatt englisch? Sehr interessant.

Oi! Noch jemand, der Deutsch spricht! Eine Ueberraschung nach der andere... Wieso hast Du Deutsch an der Uni gewaehlt, anstatt irgend eine andere Sprache? Warum findest Du Deutsch interessant? Diese Sachen interessieren mich...

BTW, we were having problems with the mod and thus shut it down. I may try it again later.

For the idea of foreign language forums to work, we would need to go recruit people elsewhere, in foreign language sites. People who are already in Legion World are generally comfortable posting in English, in most cases they prefer posting/reading in English rather in other languages. Right now, we could have single threads in foreign languages, and it would be nice enough, but I suspect that they would soon peeter out, because people would naturally tend to fall back into English. What I was suggesting is giving non-English speakers a more-or-less permanent home here at Legion World.

And yes, occasional contributions in English should of course be 'allowed', just as foreign language contributions in English threads are. It just would be a mistake to expect many readers to understand them...

I'm not trying to dismiss your idea here, Juan, but the removal of 5 forums recently has lessened my workload of backing up and maintaining the site considerably. Seriously, it was getting tedious. I didn't remove the forums without a good reason. (All posts were absorbed into other forums, BTW.)

I would prefer finding an alternative to having any more forums added. At least in the near future.

I completely understand that. Really. The post above was just an answer to FC's suggestions, not an attempt to restart the debate. We do have some technological boundaries, I can live with that.

One thing I've learned while hanging out around here is that there is obviously a LOT of behind the scenes work for keeping a place like this running properly. I've been thinking about setting up a website for work-related stuff, but I'm worried, because I know litterally nothing about these sorts of things. But I guess neither do most of the people who set up websites, so I'll probably be in good company .

Which brings me to my last point: we are incredibly lucky for having you spending your time doing things for Legion World. We really, really, appreciate that. Thanks again.

Juan

Which makes me sorta wonder - if you have to go recruiting people from other-language sites to make it work, why not just discuss the subjects there? All this would seem to really do would be to make G&S's lives harder.

Merci!

¡Gracias!

Xie xie!

Spasibo!

Danke!

Salamat!

Mahalo!

Khawp khun!

Efharisto!

Grazie!

(You get the idea. )

Actually, I like the idea of foriegn language threads and I encourage people to create them. (And recruiting never hurt us, either. )

But for now, I think they should be distributed throughout the board. When I have a high-speed connection, I may go back to adding forums. It never hurts to have some pre-made posts to start them off with. *hint hint*

Ich habe es gefunden, dass deutsch nicht so schwer ist, wie franzoesich und spanisch zu lernen.

Apfeltorte.

Es schmeckt mir gut!