English is the language here

Recently bi-lingual messages have been working well.

4 Likes

Interesting would be a way to add a machine translation automatically.
I imagine a optional setting for the writer, where you can write in familiar language and a automatic translation to English is added as part of the post.

But i don’t know how hard that would be, if it would mean additional costs or other restrictions.

This is better taken care of individually. Maybe they can install a browser plugin or something. No need to burden the site for the 99.9% of users who don’t post parallel texts. Translation engines might also object to requests coming from a single referrer and want to charge for the service.

How many other languages?

As an “only English” user, I’m not familiar with the non English www, so I am asking:
If I open this forum using another language on my computer, do I see this forum in English, or in the language I am using on my computer?

English as this forum has no mirror in different languages where an language/region detector could redirect you to. usually something like that is indicated by having a /en/ /de/ /cn/ etc. in the url or the website uses a domain of the country itself. usually the only multi-lingual websites have backing of bigger companies and there the translation only happens on the interface, not on live-content like chat/forum messages. They have probably some kind of automatic process to translate the interface each time the website is updated but having the same for live content is probably to resource intensive or error prone. So I don’t think this will be an option for this forum here in the near future, as the most important stuff here is the live content, not the interface.

1 Like

Thankyou @Tojan

Someone correct me please if I’m wrong, but:
If someone is proficient enough in English, or internet translations, to find and join this forum and do some reading or translations to navigate through this forum, they should be proficient enough to be able to post English translations to questions asked.

They could have found a post in say German through a search engine and decided to join. It doesn’t take much understanding of English or translation to sign up. Writing a coherent question in another language is another matter. You try it yourself.

Maybe, but why? What is the benefit to keep it only English? It amuses me that some people are resorting to post in two languages to keep the “peace”/“etiquette” even when they have the same mother language…

Maybe the free translation plugin is worth given a try ?

1 Like

No it’s so that others who might have relevant information can understand and contribute. A conversation only in non-English doesn’t bother me, but if I’m in a hurry, I might skip reading it, but if there is a tranalation and I think I can contribute, I do.

We are here to help where we can or wish too.

OK. I understand. Thanks for clarifications.

The point is not about peace it is more about accessibility of information. if you have a solution in english someone searching for this topic will be way more likely to find it then if it is in a language with lot less “users”. I am not an native english speaker as well but I am in many contexts pretty annoyed if a conversation about a topic where a solution for me could be is done in a language I can’t read.

Hi, I don’t speak English, so I set my Google Chrome browser to read everything in German. I no longer notice that the article was published in a different language. If someone answered in another language and Google Translate doesn’t translate it automatically, then I have another plugin that shows the content in German by marking the text and right-clicking. Of course, I don’t know if you can generally instruct Google to translate all pages. Then this topic would be done here! Greetings

Hi, ich Spreche kein englisch, daher habe ich meinen Browser Google Chrome so eingestellt, dass ich alles auf Deutsch lesen kann. Da merke ich gar nicht mehr, dass der Beitrag in einer andern Sprache veröffentlicht wurde. Hat jemand in einer andere Sprache geantwortet und Google Translate übersetzt das nicht automatisch, dann habe ich noch ein Plugin, welches durch Text markieren und rechter Maustaste den Inhalt auf Deutsch einblendet. Ich weiß natürlich nicht, ob man Google generell anweisen kann alle Seiten zu übersetzen. Dann würde sich dieses Thema hier erledigen!
Grüße

1 Like

I use the integrated translator in Vivaldi and it works quite well.

The problem with dual language postings is that we might need to check translate and verify that the English translation is not just a dummy to hide a spam posting

I would worry about that only after we see the first try of that kind. And eventually a spammer wants to give a link, it’s improbable that even plain text links without a clickable url, let alone something which doesn’t look like an url, works as a bait. You just can’t hide a real link in a foreign language text which is translated, it stands out as much as any other spam link. The only situation where a spam in some unknown language in a dual-language post goes undetected is when the embedded translation makes sense in our context and the original says something else but without a spam link, and that kind of scenario doesn’t make any sense.

Mandating the use of English gives native English speakers an unfair advantage. But of course, a single common language is very convenient.

I propose to pick a neutral language: Latin. After all, it is the original language for scientific discourse. Wasn’t the Principia Mathematica written in Latin? Latin is equally convenient for all.

An added benefit is that Latin makes for a easy spam filter. Everything not written in Latin is suppressed.

5 Likes

Ha! Reminds me of the fellow who was asking for the Esperanto translation of KiCad last year

I think @Lutz_Muller had a quite sensible solution. @der.ule also mentioned there now seems to be a free version of a plugin fir Kicad. Still, we need to help where we can or want to.

Was the fellow a native speaker?