I think an important point is that the communication here is using written, not spoken, language.
And in this regard, English, with only 26 letters, and a simple grammar, basically not caring about gender, is IMHO the easiest to use for non-native speakers if they want to write manually, at least if I compare it with other European languages which I know a bit, or with East-European or Asian languages.
Edit: … though I have to admit that I don’t understand some slang (?) phrases used by North Americans. That’s usually not a problem, though. If I think it’s important, then I can still use a translation tool.
Ofc this is true for some of the abbrs commonly used here, like “ofc” or (Zig specific) “PRO“.
I think it might be good if the translation bulletpoint in the FAQ recommended users who use translators to also include the original text in the original language, preferably within a <details> element. The accuracy of the translation can often vary radically depending on the tool, especially if the text contains technical jargon or (Internet) slang. If the original source text is included alongside the translation, if there are any oddities in the machine translation, readers can pick out the corrections from the source text using their own preferred tool (or their own ability to read the language).
From my own experience, many translators have a tendency to completely butcher Chinese/Japanese/Korean source texts that contain transliterated (and often abbreviated) jargon or names loaned from English when translated to English, and in the case of contemporary LLM-based tools, often translate the word as a completely incorrect and unrelated term instead of using a “lossy” direct romanization of the transliteration.
Just as a bit of a personal anecdote, but Rust discourse (https://users.rust-lang.org) is what taught me to use English. I had a decent “academic” knowledge of English from school, but it was the Rust forum that forced me to use the language to express my own thoughts, to find my voice, so to speak. My blog also started in response to a forum post, as an exercise in English (inspired by Steve Klabnik’s post).
To be clear, I’ve been learning English on an off since forever, and somewhat seriously since 2007 or so, so I did put my hours in
But just drilling the words&grammar isn’t everything: there’s a giant leap between passing a school exam, and using the language for real. It’s somewhat easier on the “consuming” side, as you can just bang your head against Nabokov, but on a “producing” side you need to find smart people to communicate with, and this is where special interests forums help, where no one really cares about your command of English.
Still looking for an equivalent to motivate me to use Portuguese!
As a native English speaker, I do not mind other languages at all. It’s easy enough to translate them, and I’d rather cultivate the community in a relatively open and shared space. I sometimes consider learning Mandarin or Russian so that I can gain access to those communities. There’s some incredible technical content there. Infact, I bounce off learning Mandarin every 3 or 4 months. I probably need to find a study buddy with similar technical interests.
If the posts in other languages are here, they are discoverable and we can communicate through translation. Otherwise, people will silo with their own communities and valuable insight is lost to those who don’t know where they are, or how to interface with them.
I currently speak English, Spanish, and Cantonese and have been learning Chinese for about 15 years now. I’m also the author of a free book/game that I’ve been working on for the past few years to teach Cantonese as well. The student becomes the teacher but the teacher is always a student. I’ve also studied a bunch of other languages as well, but in my Diablo II forum, I still only recommend people to use English. It makes it easier to communicate and archive information, since one of the reasons I made my forum was to have a traditional place that when people post something, it gets recorded for other future players visiting the game potentially decades after it was released (D2 came out in 2000 and we still have information being dug up from players back then that is invaluable. Using one language lessens community fragmentation, and reduces the burden on the community overall. Almost like running a code formatter on your code base and enforcing the format check at the CI level so that anyone on your team merging code only produces minimal diffs, which are easier for other people to code review.
It’s important to remember machine translation is necessarily a lossy process, it’s less like running CI and more like converting from raw to jpeg. It’s (selfishly) a worthwhile trade-off on ziggit, but I think it would be nice to encourage keeping the original text in a details element.
I’ve had to hire translators before to translate documents where I know both languages, and the quality of the work was very very very impressive and has really raised my expectations.
The industrialization of clothing production made clothing significantly cheaper, but irreparably ruined the quality of clothing and cloth. Many people do not have the skill to evaluate the construction of a garment and use proxies like brand or price to decide quality instead.
Something similar has happened with machine translation and interpretation. While the increased access to translation is truly amazing and not something I would give up, the quality of translation is far from what we should demand outside of low stakes circumstances. It is not a real substitute for skilled translation or interpretation.
For me Discourse should just have an option to write post in multiple languages, and let server decide what to show to the reader, and allow reader to read any submitted text.
But until that is not the case, writing by hand language codes or annotating in different way our posts is fine.
In case there is author only wrote post in their native language, and we want to reply, it should be normal to quote their text, provide translation we worked with, and then reply, author will do the same with our reply, and they will have all information to check if they were understood.
People just reading forum also will have easier as they will be provided translations that were used in the discussion, so everyone would be working on the same text.
wait, are most of us non-English speakers? that’s hilarious, since everyone assumes all the rest are native speakers resulting in the “sorry for my English, it’s not my native language”
I’m Arab btw, Moroccan to be exact, English is something I learned myself since our schools use Fr*nsh
I only really understand English, but personally I would much prefer people post the text they originally wrote, and optionally a translation in addition it if they would like to. I believe his is the best for two reasons.
It preserves linguistic diversity. If everyone only uses English, every other language will die.
Only posting the translated text ossifies the text at the capability of current translation software. Translation software is getting better very quickly, and by only posting the translated text now, the ability to use future translation software is lost.
Not to mix metaphors dangerously, but I worry about bringing in a dependency on machine translation here. Posting in English is obviously not ideal, but machine translation does not really appear to be that good, and has knock-on effects similar to accepting a dependency on LLMs for coding: it makes offline work more difficult, it brings in a demonstrably unreliable third party (just in terms of machine translation being a moving target) in a pretty vulnerable, high trust part of the stack, and it commodifies an inherently free part of human experience.
Considering all the edge cases English has from being an amalgamation of Celtic (original Britons), West-Germanic (Angle-Saxons), French (Normans) and a whole lot of influences from all kinds of languages from around the world thanks to the history of the British Empire, I actually disagree that English is an easy language.
Sure, it looks easy on the surface (just like bash does), but when you actually start using it, you suddenly get splashed in the face with a stupid amount of edge cases. That’s also the reason why I would follow ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English standard if I would ever need to write a technical document in English (@andrewrk this could be of interest to you for when you are writing the Zig language specification).
Actually, English as a language is currently in the process of splitting apart into multiple Englishes thanks to all the different countries around the world where it’s used as the native English. One interesting example is Singapore where an amalgamation between English and Mandarin is starting to form (small fun fact: There is no linguistic difference between a language and a dialect).
But in general I don’t think that English is a language well suited for expressing yourself precisely compared to other human languages. English is imo a good language for poetry and the like, don’t get me wrong, but at least in my opinion the properties which make a language good at poetry make it bad at precision and vice versa.
Ha. I hearted @glfmn’s post immediately, as my experience with reading various translations of great works of fiction like Les Miserables or Brothers Karamazov heightened my sense of awe with excellent translation years ago. But you’re right, too, @IbrahimOuhamou, and I think it highlights one important thing: whether translated by one means or another, when one’s thoughts and questions are on the table, one is in a very vulnerable position. It’s easy to be misinterpreted; clarity does not come easily. So we should all be reminded of how important it is to respond with kindness and deference.
Don’t forget Latin of the empire that ruled Britain four centuries. “Original” Britons were in the process of converting from Celtic to Latin by the time the empire fell. Look up Latin loanwords in Welsh.
Starting with the infamous mismatch between spelling and pronunciation.
I guess we can predict that international English is going to stay for the forseeable future. Earlier international languages survived much longer than the respective empires. Aramaic was used centuries after Assyria, Babylon and Achaemenid Empire. Koine Greek was the language of eastern part of Roman Empire long after the death of Alexander the Great. Medieval kings used Latin to write their laws long after the fall of Roman Empire. Arabic is still in use today long after Crusaders, Turks and Mongols destroyed the caliphate. India tried to get rid of English after 1947 but failed. Russian is the language of both sides of the war in Ukraine. Chinese will not replace English as international lingua franca unless China conquers more than British and American empires combined. The world need some language to communicate internationally and English will be used even if it is no longer anyone’s native language.
I think that both English translation and non-English original should be allowed. The author desides if they want to keep the original or use machine translation or both.
