Can we make some clarification in the description of the category about the available languages in Ask Fedora?

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today a TOPIC was made in askfedora in RUSSIAN, it isn’t an available language because we don’t have any moderator for that purpose according with our POLICIES

Is in undefined-language tag…

This is the SOP for defining a new language.,

Can we make some clarification in the description of the category about the available languages on ASKFEDORA???

at least before the merging and enable language translator on Fedora Discussion site…

Regards.,

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I’ve been thinking about this for a few days.

I think that, with decent machine translation widely available[1], basic “is this spam” or “is this hostile” moderation can be done even by moderators who don’t speak the language. So, I’m thinking we might as well allow them — what’s the harm?

If a new language becomes really popular and there are long discussions, we will probably be able to recruit a new moderator to handle that.

I also don’t see a real problem with posting both in English and a native language — sure, it’s a double-post, but in a different category with a different audience.

The only thing I’d like is for someone to help me with tag naming for these languages. When we discussed this before folks strongly favored tags for languages using that language. This is fine, but as a monolingual English speaker, I don’t know the nuances of parts of speech of other languages. In this case, I guess русский — but I’m not 100% sure that’s right.

  1. even before we figure out what we want to do with Discourse Translator, there are options like Firefox Translator) ↩︎

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Anyone else have opinions? :classic_smiley:

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I always have an opinion. :rofl:

I think that there is no need to restrict the languages. Either allow only English or allow any language. There are translation tools available and dedicated moderators who speak the native language are not a definitive need.

I also agree with your point that if a language becomes popular, we will have people who can recruit to help. To be honest, I don’t think that will happen. The reality is that frequent posters will probably realize the English language topics get more attention and non-English language topics will not overwhelm the forum and can be translated manually.

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On one hand translation indeed becomes easier now, with many translation engines available.

On the other, why would we put the burden of using the translation engine on a moderator and not the user?

If we expect that moderator can read the question with Auto-translation, shouldn’t we expect the user to be able to write the question with Auto-translation too?

I would think about the UX like this:

  • when I am writing a post, I choose my language and write the question
  • there is a translate button in the editor, which takes my text, translates into English and posts in the message body, while puts the original content into the “original” block, collapsed by default
  • when I click “post”, the post is created as usual, no special tags or separate categories.

If we ask Discourse folks really nicely, will they implement it? :slight_smile:

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In my opinion, the Moderators is not neccessary to read all non-English posts.

Those posts can be defered for the Users to discuss. Only when something happened (someone flags a post, a thread becomes extremely hot, etc), then Moderators need to look at them.

Non-English users can also use Translation Engine, for example, from Japanese to Chinese, then reply in the Languae that the writer is most comfortable to express oneself.

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