Keep it English please so everybody can follow this.
let me translate it for you 
“It’s sad that not many people in China know about MAIDSAFE”
(i don’t know a word mandarin (?) but I hope the translation of my colleague mandarin->german and my german->english didn’t loose too much of the initial meaning :D)
3 Likes
That seems very harsh, we should encourage other people to use our forum.
Please don’t tell people to do this.
Post helpful translations if you want, but let everyone stay (as in, they’ll feel unwelcome and they’ll leave if you keep doing this, man)
imagine if we had a great community of people from China using our forum, how much good that would do for people. Does the forum software have translation tools built in?
[happybeing EDIT: this is something we might need to debate so maybe take this to a new topic in meta category? I don’t think it is good to have posts in various languages - its fine to post in another language if you include a translation, but it becomes impossible to moderate and very hard for the majority to follow. So for now English is policy, but by all means discuss as I’ve suggested.]
3 Likes
This is a forum for everybody and English is the used language, as far as I know most Chinese do speak English as well (please let me know if this is not the case).
1 Like
You sound like arrogant American, “This is 'merica, and we only speak English! Learn it or gtfo!”
You could always use google translator.
We need more variety of cultures on this forum.
3 Likes
Make it an arrogant Dutch guy if you want to call it arrogant. Like @happybeing said in @whiteoutmashups post, this is a moderated forum which can’t be done if we’re starting to talk in all kinds of languages.
Everybody is welcome, but if we want to have a forum with multiple or other languages besides English we’d need to find other solutions for that but can’t do that here (right now) if we want to keep things clean and clear.
1 Like
We really need forums for the community in all languages. Is there any way we could have a drop down on this one for different languages, or does it make sense to have completely separate forums for each language?
Just add languages to the categories section.
2 Likes
I’ll look into this later today, I’m not sure how the Discourse software can handle this the best way. I’m also not sure if we really need it already, maybe we can create a poll for this later too.
Well maybe THAT’S the problem here 
Not people speaking other languages…!!! 
That’s not the problem. but like I said, we can look to solution if there’s demand for that.
The truth is that, until now, care for other languages has been nil. If we want to expand SAFE worldwide will have to consider opening up to other languages.
Some initiatives, such as the translation of systemdocs, was abandoned.
3 Likes
I translated an entire e-commerce site into 3 languages on elance and it was pretty cheap. Perhaps we could get the maidsafe foundation to fund this effort (@nicklambert?) or we could crowd fund the effort?
like me, i know 3 languages and i have earned over 10 btc from bitcointalk translation offers.
i am willing to help, but i am very busy recently, i will help translate when the full SAFE network is implemented.
1 Like
Why do you think it was abandoned? Several translations were done and another started recently AFAIK. There may have been changes in documentation organisation but I don’t think its true to say translations were abandoned. Maybe @nicklambert can give us the current status of multilingual documentation and any other resources?
Well, the topic about systemdocs translation stopped suddenly in April and finished translation, like french or spanish, never was used. In the wiki are some pages in dutch and a few in german. But that’s all (maybe Nick is working otherwise).
1 Like
The system docs were translated into French and German thanks to the great work of @nowfeelsafer, @hillbicks and @BambooGarden. Because of the tireless effort of @fergish driving forward and improving the ENglish version of the system docs they are now downlevel. There was some talk of these being translated into other languages, but I was not aware these were ever completed. If the French and Spanish translations were completed @digipl please send these over and we’ll get them onto the wiki asap.
Regards the OP. In my experience forums tend to be language focussed, this is not to exclude anyone, it just becomes impractical unless you are very multi lingual.
4 Likes
I made the experience that once multiling forums started the community started to fall apart. Look up btctalk - it´s really not doing very well and it´s Bitcoin with a market cap over 4,000,000,000 - MaidSafe is closely above 7,000,000 and the community is tiny in comparison. It´s not saying there is no need, maybe there is. But let´s face it, that´s a lot of work and moderation of this forum is already a great challenge for a small community. People have to accept that one has to place priorities, because there is not an endless amount of effort.
Oh PS, I have to reinforce that I´m glad this is a moderated forum. I wouldn´t be here if it wasn´t.
5 Likes
hmmm - i don’t care that much about simple short comments in other languages 
discussions on the other hand are a different thing and have to be in english of course … because it is the only language everybody here is able to understand =O … it wouldn’t be helpful for the project if we had parallel discussions in english, spanish, french, german, mandarin, russian, italian, etc (sorry for the ones i didn’t mention ; )… and then had to merge these different discussions again to get to a solution … ridiculous …
of course
this is 100% true!
but it doesn’t really make sense to translate everything in the system description as long as the system changes …
I have the impression some people here are extremely sensitive for moderation lately
I would suggest everybody takes a deep breath, thinks a while if it wouldn’t be an option to wait some more weeks before translating everything in all the other languages and maybe the Maidsafe-Team could discuss including a Language-Option at the maidsafe.net-website =O most of the data there is very general info and probably won’t change - reaching out for people of all languages there definitely would be a good idea and maybe even important for success of the project (I’m sure there are many people here that would be willing to translate the different topics)
1 Like
MAYBE - in that the language issue does not seem to be all that frequent - and until a proper solution is implemented- the mods can just simply RESPECTFULLY ASK for an english translation from the OP. Thats not to say Melvin was rude, but maybe a gentler approach may yield great returns. Just my VIO…
2 Likes