Language Specific Support: must read!

[Joachim Müller]

The "official" language of the coppermine boards is English (simply because it has become the "universal" language), with the only exception to this rule being the board "Language Specific Support": we started it as an experiment only recently, with a sub-board dedicated to coppermine support in french. The reason for not having support boards in other languages besides french is quite simple: so far, nobody has volunteered to moderate such a sub-board.

• If you think you're familar enough with coppermine,
  
• if you speak both english and the other language you're requesting a language specific sub-board for and
  
• if you're interessted to become a moderator on the language-specific sub-board

you're welcome to reply to this thread, offering your help (please do not just request that a sub-board in your language should be started if you're only looking for support; you should be able and willing to actually give support instead).

Please understand that the "regular" supporters and dev team members from the overall board (the English board) will not visit the language specific support board(s) - simply because they can't understand what is going on there.

Joachim

[chtito]

Hi Gaugau,

i propose to be moderator in the language specific board. I'm willing to give help in the languages i speak or understand, besides French and English (Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Russian). I don't think that it's worth creating subboards for these languages, though.

I think that this is the only way to estimate the needs in language specific help. No moderator will volunteer if nobody has ever asked a question in his language.

Two facts are important to bear in mind:
1) many people on this planet do not speak English at all
2) many people speak a very elementary English which is not sufficient to describe their problem with coppermine

Sometimes it's easier to help folk who can express their problem properly in their language than poorly in English...

We might consider this as an experience and see where it goes. If no other contributor shows up, we stop the experience because i won't have time to take care of all this.

cheers!

== Olivier

[Joachim Müller]

I removed permissions for "regular" users to start new threads in the root of "coppermine.sourceforge.net  |  Support  |  Language Specific Support" - they can only reply to existing threads now. We've discussed this a long time ago (on the old board) - I agree and understand that people prefer to ask questions in their native language, but if they don't even speak english good enough to post their question in most basic english, they proably won't have been able to read the docs neither, which is a pre-requisite imo. Everybody should at least try to be part of the solution, and if it's only the effort to come up with a question in a language they don't speak so well. There are other dev team members who speak other languages besides english, but imo the effort for one supporter to maintain multiple languages is just to great to waste resources having identical questions being answered in more than one language. It's very honorable of you to propose support of even more languages, but I can see the potential danger of the language specific board being abandoned sooner or later for the same reason the "Coppermine for CMS" support board was abandoned: there were just to many takers and no givers.
Bottom line is: I'd prefer to have sub-boards for each language that actually is supported, so if you volunteer to support spanish as well, I will create a sub-board for this purpose too (and of course for any other language you or anybody else is ready to maintain). Maybe we should move this discussion to the closed dev board, as I will of course respect a decision made by the team: if the team decides to allow all languages, I will of course set the permissions accordingly.

Joachim

P.S. You already have moderator status on the "Language Specific Support" board (you had it in the first place)

[Casper]

Also, we have never said people who struggle with english cannot post in there own language.  We have advised such users to post in their attempt at english, with their own language underneath.  We also asked anyone replying in that language to post the english translation as well.

This has the benefit that english speaking supporters, who understand what is being asked, can reply in english as well.

ps, the French board seems to be going well.

[CapriSkye]

i can help moderate a chinese board, traditional chinese specifically but doesn't matter. it's better now to have one board for both versions. thanks

[Joachim Müller]

@CapriSkye: I created a Chinese sub-board. Please let me know if you want me to edit the title/description. Thanks for your readiness to help.

Joachim

[CapriSkye]

will you please change 台灣 to 中文
some people will get mad...

[Joachim Müller]

did as you requested - changed

台灣

to

中文

What does

台灣

mean? Is it an insult ? Politically incorrect?

Joachim

[CapriSkye]

it means taiwan, i didn't actually mean that people will get mad, it's just that people from china probably don't want to see the name taiwan here
instead use 中文 would be better, it means Chinese. so people from china and taiwan will be both be happy.
thanks gaugau

[chtito]

@Gaugau: yes, you're right, that would be a waste of time to have people asking the same questions over and over again in all the languages of the world .

@Casper: i wasn't aware of that policy of double language (i didn't read the sticky posts, shame on me!). That seems to address the concerns i had. It would be great to have that possibility emphasised when people experience difficulties to describe their problem because of the language.

[Joachim Müller]

CapriSkye: then would it be wise to change the chinese chars in the language drop down from "Chinese-Big5 (台灣)" and "Chinese-GB2312 (中国)" to "Chinese simplified (中文 - 简体)" and "Chinese traditional (中文 - 繁體)" as seen on the Firefox page?

Joachim

[CapriSkye]

i think it'd be better to make the change, since big5 isn't limited to taiwan only, i believe hong kong uses big5 too.

[Hein Traag]

  luckily most dutchies can speak and write english fairly good  

[George_CC]

If it'll be useful...
My english is not so good, but I understand Coppermine and can provide russian-language support if needed...

[Joachim Müller]

so you're suggesting to start a russian-sub board with you as moderator? I'm fine with this idea - please post, how the sub-board should be labelled - would "Русский" be OK?

Joachim

[George_CC]

Yes, "Русский" is ok!

[Joachim Müller]

Created a russian sub-board as suggested. Good luck with it - please let me know if you need administrative help on it.

Cheers

Joachim

[George_CC]

Thanks GauGau!

But I have a little problem: board uses ISO-8859-1 character coding, and cyrillic characters are represented as
Добро etc. It is not critical in message body, but the topic title is truncated to 100 symbols and I see "Добро пожаловат&" instead "Добро пожаловать на русскоязычный форум!"

[Joachim Müller]

hm, not sure what to do about this, except to replace truncating with allowing less chars. Any other ideas?

Joachim

[George_CC]

Sadly, MySQL varchar field has only 255 characters maximum lenght...
But I have some ideas... I now have SMF installed on my server and try to write some mod to fix this problem: for example, it may be on-the-fly unicode conversion or board-dependent charset selection, I need to make some experiments with this
If it will be done and working smoothly, can you install it? Imho, it'll be useful else for Chinesian board and any other language-specific boards in future...