I understand it's very convenient for people who know English to keep it that way, but I don't think that it serves Swift itself and its community very well. It's exacerbated by the lack of translation of the official documentation to other languages, but we shouldn't cut off great ideas and bright minds just based on the languages they use.
1 Like
Well I do understand all your view points, however I said my standpoint loud and clear already that I as non-native English speaker would still be against encouraging non-English threads in these forums. You are free to disagree with that though.
(One hypothetical example: I really don't want to use machine translation for threads which are written in for example Chinese. Often times such translations would/could be inaccurate. It would only make things even more difficult.)
Also if we ever did anything like what you guys want, then I'd highly want the site admins to provide a language filter as it could become very tiring to filter out posts of interest manually.
It is not merely my disagreementâthis is in direct opposition to the official policy of the forums that community members are "encouraged to use their language of choice". Please start a new thread if you wish to have a discussion about changing this policy.
I think that such a feature would be very reasonable in a world where we have a significant volume of non-English posts. I don't anticipate that there would be a sudden influx of non-English posts simply by adding a built-in "translate" button, though. I'm most interested in seeing additional tools for the community that help achieve the stated goals of encouraging participation in all languages.
1 Like
If you want to rephrase me my post. I'm not trying to change anything. I'm okay with the way it is right now. That's all I meant to say. 
I don't think I can provide any more valuable feedback to this thread or issue. I'm going to step back and watch what other post. 
1 Like
Thank you for your perspective! Obviously, the input of non-native-English speakers is incredibly useful in this area. It's unfortunate that it is difficult for non-English speakers to participate, though, since their input would be most useful here 
.
2 Likes
Instead of language-specific sub-forums, might it be better if the polyglots among us could provide translations while answering non-english questions. It would be a lot of work tho.
Right, putting that burden on the members of the community who are already undertaking the additional effort of answering non-English questions (since the majority of the community is unable to help) is a flawed approach. It's like running your unit tests by having a QA engineer copy-paste bits of code into a playground one at a time. Yes, maybe the human aspects will be able to more intelligently filter out flaky test failures, but it's really something that should be solved by tooling if it's going to gain any significant traction.
Less work would be to have machine translation and then polyglots who can point out mistranslations when relevant.
4 Likes
Communities benefit non-linearly from more people engaging with each other, so there's value in people sticking to a common language (English) if they're comfortable with it. And parts of the experience here are likely to remain locked to English indefinitely: for example, I can't imagine that we would post an evolution proposal in any other language. However, we would much prefer that people come here and participate in whatever language they're comfortable with than that they not come at all. If that leads to a more fractured forums community, it's probably representative of an equal fracture in the broader community that should be addressed just as comprehensively.
5 Likes
I don't expect the forums to solve the hard problem of cross-language communication, but the "non-linear benefits" reasoning is a justification for resisting any change which would potentially increase the number of community participants (like, say, expanding official Swift support to additional platforms). If this forum were set up in such a way that only US-based IP addresses could access it, justifying that on the basis of the non-linear benefits of increased engagement would be similarly unsatisfying. I am not under the impression that this forum is near some sort of critical mass in terms of community participation, though maybe the admins feel differently.
1 Like
I think you're responding to a lot of things I didn't say. The forums are completely open to people participating in whatever language they like. Like it or not, there are advantages for both them and the rest of the community if that language is English, even if they feel they're not really fluent; but if they choose to use a different language, that is 100% acceptable, and we will support them as best we can.
1 Like
Apologies if you felt mischaracterizedâI interpreted this sentence as implying something akin to, "the existing language barriers are a good thing because it limits the number of people who can engage with one another" (with the implicit assumption that we should, for some reason, want to limit that number); could you clarify what you meant by this?
I'm not suggesting here that proposals be professionally translated into multiple languages, and I don't think that providing a low-friction way to easily translate posts inline will result in a significant departure from the current dominance of English. If the "translate" button were a simple switch that could be flipped on in the Discourse settings panel, it seems to me like it would be non-controversial to enable it.
1 Like
We want more people to participate in the community. It's fine for them to participate in whatever language they're comfortable in. But in borderline cases, I personally think it is better for people to participate in perhaps-imperfect English, because I think more people will read and respond to it, and that's better for both them and the community.
I may just have a lot less faith in machine translation than you do.
2 Likes
Thanks, John, that makes sense. Sorry for the misunderstanding. I think it probably is indicative of our relative impressions of machine translation (I, like @michelf have been pleasantly surprised at the results of copy-pasting some non-English posts into Google Translate (and DeepL!) over the past day or so), and I also agree that it is simply true that community members will probably have a better experience overall if they're able to participate in English.
However, I still think that leaves a glaring hole in the form of community members who are simply unable to participate in English. Currently, they either have to do the work of copy-pasting every reply and post to/from a machine translator themselves, or reduce their audience to those community members who happen to speak the same language. IMO the current barriers are high enough that it can pretty much be expected that non-English posts will not receive engagement from most of the community. If the end result is machine-translated posts anyway, what is lost by making that an officially supported feature?
I'm not suggesting any policy change, or denying the reality that this forum is easiest to engage with in English. But especially as Swift expands onto more platforms, and as localized diagnostics improve the development experience for non-English speakers, IMO, the community will be missing out on an opportunity for enrichment if we don't put in effort towards improving the experience on the forums for non-English speakers.
I've valued features to this effect on various social media platforms when it's been available. Twitter's "Translate this Tweet" button has been effective enough for me to understand quite well tweets in a diverse set of languages. There's a big difference, of course, between a tweet and an in-depth technical discussion, but just from brief experimentation I believe that support of this nature would be a net positive for the community.
2 Likes
This is a very constructive suggestion, although Iâm not aware that the infrastructure for such a thing exists. It has been on my mind and Iâve been pondering the best way to mimic it without direct support from Discourse. I deliberately tagged the thread with deutsch, so that a German user can filter by their own language, and german, so that other users could know what it was. But thatâs not a very comprehensive solution, because even if everyone maintained such a tagging scheme, an English user would still have difficulty filtering out everything else. (And I donât think it is manageable to go back and retag every existing thread as english.)
There are only two categories that are likely to ever see many posts in other languages, so maybe categories would be feasible:
- âUsing Swiftâ. Maybe if the volume in a particular language becomes enough to pollute the âNewâ notifications, etc, a separate âUsing Swiftâ could be created for that particular language, so that it could be easily filtered out.
- A hypothetical âLocalizationâ category, such as for threads about translating the The Swift Programming Language, or about localizing compiler diagnostics. Those participating in that category are likely dealing with multiple languages at once anyway, so it is probably more useful to them to have everything mixed together than separated into subcategories. But at least with its own umbrella category, those only interested in compiler development or evolution would be able to easily filter it all out.
Even in English, the official âmoderatorsâ still rely on the community to bring things to their attention. They donât have the bandwidth to read everything themselves.
Itâs not as hard to âpoliceâ as you might think. A while ago we got a Korean phishing thread, and within hours it was identified and removed, even though no one involved in that process actually spoke Korean. And when the German thread in question turned south once the issue of language was brought up, the offending post didnât even last long enough for me to get to see it. (I can only infer roughly what must have happened based on the surrounding context.)
As we discuss this, I think it is important to realize that sentiments differ from place to place, and that a forum like this has to somehow be usable by the whole spectrum.
On one hand, you have places like Germany, where youâre cool if you speak English, because itâs seen as the happening language. If you want a good job, youâd better speak it well.
On the other hand, you have places like QueĚbec, where youâre a traitor if you speak English, because itâs seen as foreign encroachment. Youâd better not use it in the workplace, otherwise your company risks legal action.
(These are just the prevailing stereotypes; obviously there is some variation even within each region.)
3 Likes