There have been several posts recently which have been written in some other language than English. The forum is international and there must be one common language, and it’s English. I hope those who answer questions don’t use some other language exclusively. Even just adding a google translation is OK in my opinion. Old forum members should point out when others start discussing in some other language.
6 Likes
DeepL Translate: The world's most accurate translator usually gives much better results for supported languages, especially German (the language of the recent posts).
3 Likes
It was decided a while back that we would encourage English but we will help where we can. Feel free to ignore none English, or if you are in the mood, run it through a translator.
My inclination is to let it go and see if a native speaker picks it up. My main concern is appropriate content but if I see a known member pick up the thread I don’t worry about it.
2 Likes
New users using languages I cannot understand are a problem. A few times I have used google to find I am looking at a gambling advert in Vietnamese or Thai
3 Likes
You do seem to take care of these before I see them because of your time zone. I guess at this point it is more about languages like French, German, Spanish. The Asian character set is not something that I know any regular user here can help with.
1 Like
I was amazed to find that google will translate traditional chineese from a photo!, i was browsing a popular auction site, took a screen capture, google copied the text from the photo and i pasted it into the translator, still amazed it worked, i now have a set of instructions that I can use 
2 Likes
There is a translation plugin for this forum software:
… But I’m guessing it’s not “free”.
I’ve got no idea about the costs, maybe at some point KiCad is big and popular enough to be able to have a budget for things like this.
But until that time arrives, it should not be too much to ask for the posters themselves to translate their own texts.
1 Like
Having many languages in use becomes hard work for the moderators. Spamming is a major nuisance.
Out of curiosity:
What happens with spamming? Does it make it onto the forum and is deleted before most notice, or does it end up in a folder only accessible to moderators?
How many a week, or day?
I’ve only killed about half a dozen in the last 9 months.
Some is autodetected, hidden and flagged for moderation. I won’t say here what the main criteria is for obvious reasons.
More makes it in and gets spotted by the forum users and flagged.
There are moderators in several timezones, so reaction is pretty fast
3 Likes
It would be nice to be able to provide one central clearing house for Kicad users.
I am first language English, and personally I have no issue with other languages being used for posts. On the other hand I am not a moderator and can definitely see the issues it could create with moderation workload. As a suggestion: I read the forums for the gentoo linux distribution as well, and there they have an international section where people can put messages in their own language, and there are moderators who are fluent enough to manage those sub forums. Could this also be an option here, particularly for the more common languages (such as German)?
Kicad fluent, Electronics fluent, Language fluent, Time fluent, all of the preceding? A pretty big ask, and another level of administration?
How big is the user base of the product and the forum?
Cost to run the forum?
It seems that with Discourse, the more administrators, the larger the package and the more expensive the forum is to host. https://discourse.org/pricing
The major language used by the electronics industry is?
@paul.j an interesting idea, but…
Then again, maybe I’m a bit too cynical in my not so youthful years. 
There are already other support forums in Chinese and Spanish, which cover two of the major languages. (Spanish is a LOT more than Spain)
Where I am in Malaysia, an engineer can be expected to be competent in English. The same for Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines.
We just have one Chinese looking message in the moderation queue…
I just released it with a translation. I didn’t know about the Chinese group. If any one knows the link maybe post in that thread. But bottom line is, we try and help the Kicad Community as much as we are able and/or willing. ONE forum for the developers to follow would be nice if that Discourse translation module ever makes it down to the free level. Not sure that the people that have provide the paid version would care to make it available to other open source projects. Might be worth the ask.
I do have issues with that.
There are quite a lot of people coming here with some kind of problem (maybe not even registering) and searching though old posts for their answers. I also put in quite some effort (but not always, depending on my mood) to answer questions in a bit broader way then the original question asked for, because it improves the chance that the answer fits for others searching for answers.
Posting in another language breaks that. The vast majority of people searching for answers can not do much with posts in another language. Without even knowing in advance if a post has useful information for them, the incentive to put it though a translation engine is very low.
In the past I complained about other languages, and even asked Chris Gammel about his point of view. He is apparently ok with it. And I sort of agree with him too. I think the best approach is to allow it but discourage it.
For me, I’ve stopped putting time in it. If I see a post in another language (Even though I can read some French and German) I just close the post. I don’t even bother to read it, and I think it’s the same for the majority of regular posters here. Asking a question in another language reduces the chance on a good answer. And for the OP it should not be very difficult to translate their own posts.
Indeed, it says so on:
and as far as I know, this KiCad forum is a self hosted variant set up by Chris.
Just keep on hoping that he never goes rogue like that other web related person…
That one has 13 posts in this year, which is 13/(31+14) = 0.3 per day. That does not seem much.
There are links to the Spanish and Chinese forums on:
3 Likes
That is a lot more posts (threads) than either the Chinese or Spanish forums linked on the Kicad.org page.
Program is free open source but the hosting space isn’t. Someone, somewhere, pays for that.
This. People that post in another language will automatically receive fewer answer (if at all), I am fine with that instead of the answer “write in English” “English is the language here” etc. And if somebody understands and answers, great!
3 Likes