Why the need of non-english discussions?
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I like the idea of subscribing to forums but don't know if it will be enough to address the language issue.
I would assume that people will start threads on any forum (mobile, desktop,...) using their "first language" and probably this is something that we want to support as long as we can create filters.
Is this suggestion in addition to or instead of the other language related suggestions for the forums?
Some that I remember:
being able flag thread with language tag (on first post);
language as search criteria;
filter language anywhere we have a list of threads;
language indicator for each thread anywhere we have a list of threads;
allowing users to select his preferred languages on profile so by language filters will default to them.These are just the ones I remember related to forums. There are others related to the wiki.
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I just created "a new thread":http://developer.qt.nokia.com/forums/viewthread/2870/ suggesting to remove the group forum threads from the "posts since last visit". I think it could be a work around until a longer term solution can be found.
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It's not spelled out explicitly, but part of common use :-) Before we had groups there was only english content in the forum (the wiki had translations already). This rule still applies but the groups owners can decide to allow native languages in their forums too. So the main forums are readable by all users, the non-english content is mainly in the regional forums (and therefore needs not tagged/marked specially, IMHO). Once the forum subscription is live (see Marius' comment "here":http://developer.qt.nokia.com/forums/viewreply/16328/) we can opt out for the content we do not understand.
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However I think that there are people not interested in regional issues so, maybe they are not interesting for readers of other countries, for example a discussion in Russian about how to receive the Nokia's OVI store payments in Russia describing all the legal issues and taxes features. If you're living outside Russia maybe you won't be interested at all in these kind of regional topics.
So, I think is OK the different languages an multi-regions in the forum. Personally for me it's great to get in touch with different idioms because I'm learning not only a programming language.
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[quote author="qtrahul" date="1293599574"]One suggestion : We can use Google Translate to convert any language in different one.[/quote]
It can be helpful, but it isn't really that good. Some time it messes up the meaning.
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[quote author="Luca" date="1293006598"]Hi all,
I'm an italian developer and sometimes my english has some errors but I think that writing in italian deny non-italian users to understand it.Now I see a lot of topic in a lot of languages that I can't understand. In this way I can't support then discussion or I can't be helped by the discussion .
What do you think about?[/quote]
In my opinion, there are "cons" and "pros" from the existence of non-english "sub-forums" in the forum. One positive aspect is that more not fluent english speakers will join the forum. :)
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[quote author="QtK" date="1293610466"]
[quote author="qtrahul" date="1293599574"]One suggestion : We can use Google Translate to convert any language in different one.[/quote]It can be helpful, but it isn't really that good. Some time it messes up the meaning.[/quote]
I agree with QtK! It is a good tool, but one has to be very cautious about how they will interpret the results of the translation.
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Also if the solution was that easy - Alexandra won't get to do "fishing":http://developer.qt.nokia.com/blog/view/done_fishing. Also translators won't get those cool t-shirts.
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Volker is right, there are non-English stuff only in the regional forums, which is right, everywhere else there is only and just English content in the forum. As it is said in the "Tagging wiki":http://developer.qt.nokia.com/wiki/Tagging everyone should tag with "language:code" every non-English material, so it's already filtered out. It's just a little scripting no to hide it from the new posts, I don't get really this big problem about this...
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[quote author="lrazo" date="1293586641"]However I think that there are people not interested in regional issues so, maybe they are not interesting for readers of other countries, for example a discussion in Russian about how to receive the Nokia's OVI store payments in Russia describing all the legal issues and taxes features. If you're living outside Russia maybe you won't be interested at all in these kind of regional topics.[/quote]
The Trolls already take care of this problem, see Marius' answer on page one of this thread! Did you read it? It is already agreed upon! And now give them some time to implement things, please!
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Back on topic, here is an interesting perspective on our reliance on English, this infographic is from http://thenextweb.com/asia/2010/12/21/chinese-the-new-dominant-language-of-the-internet-infographic/
Qt is big in China, we have a "dedicated office":http://qt.nokia.com/about/nokia-qt-offices and a dedicated "Qt community site":http://qt.csdn.net/ there. If I were going to learn a new language I would seriously consider Chinese. :)
!http://thenextweb.com/asia/files/2010/12/TNW_internetlanguages_vs4.jpeg(infographic)!
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@_mariusg_: very interesting graph. Thanks for sharing.