International sections? Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese...

[timofonic]

Hello.

Are there plans to add international forum sections? I'm interested for the following reasons:

- EEVblog's subtitles in English and Spanish: It can help me to improve my English skills.
- Information about where to buy components and equipment, buy and sell to others, organize group buy.
- Organize meetings, *spaces and workshops.


Regards.

[ElektroQuark]

I asked about subtitles, but Dave dismissed the idea.
I vote for the Spanish forum, it will have two users at least

[tautech]

Not a bad idea as this is a truly international forum.

But how could you moderate it?
As skilled as Moderators maybe, between them all I'd say it would be a tough ask.

Mandarin anyone?

Edit
Unless able to be moderated 
Emphasis added also

[PA0PBZ]

Not a bad idea as this is a truly international forum.

I think it is a bad idea just because of that. Let's keep it an international forum and not break up the userbase by language.

[Muttley Snickers]

I'm fluent in gibberish, looks like other's are as well.


Anonymous Poster

[ElektroQuark]

Not a bad idea as this is a truly international forum.

I think it is a bad idea just because of that. Let's keep it an international forum and not break up the userbase by language.

I think the idea is to add new users, those that not speak English.

[Zucca]

I asked about subtitles, but Dave dismissed the idea.

Well... English must be the only language used because every single information we write could help others not in your country.  Those who are not speaking english and dealing with EE are rare animals and they should learn this language ASAP!

A nice idea could be to start some sections for people living in the same country... and discover they are living maybe in the same city.
Info sharing for people living in the same country could be very useful, see my recent posts.

If this will happen I think will be hard to keep English the standard language thow.

For me, I just post something in the chat section and get all the international info I want.

[ElektroQuark]

There are many no EE here: hobbyist, enthusiasts, and from them to EEs.

[daqq]

Impractical:

- the need for extra moderation
- isolation of groups of users

The point of a forum is to have as many people collaborating as possible and the results of this collaboration are supposed to be available to as many people. By effectively splitting the forum into such sections you get less people per area. Also, the people who are multilingual will have to watch more forums at the same time.

Whether we like the situation or not, some knowledge of English is absolutely necessary if you are serious (or even mildly interested) in electronics. There are MUCH better ways to improve your language skills than to look at a theme specific forum.

David

[timofonic]

I asked about subtitles, but Dave dismissed the idea.

Well... English must be the only language used because every single information we write could help others not in your country.  Those who are not speaking english and dealing with EE are rare animals and they should learn this language ASAP!

A nice idea could be to start some sections for people living in the same country... and discover they are living maybe in the same city.
Info sharing for people living in the same country could be very useful, see my recent posts.

If this will happen I think will be hard to keep English the standard language thow.

For me, I just post something in the chat section and get all the international info I want.

That's my point!

I want to know where to buy cheap and good quality equipment (I'm poor!), buy and sell from others, group buying stuff,  planning workshops and meetings.


It would be very interesting if other forums organize an interforum section and help others to discover people in their zones. I think of it as a geeky Facebook but without procrastinating, useful and.not owned by a single entity.

 I don't care about using written English and I would like to slowly hear nerdy stuff from other people in electronics if some friendly nerd visits my city (I'll invite you to a beer!).

Impractical:

- the need for extra moderation
- isolation of groups of users

The point of a forum is to have as many people collaborating as possible and the results of this collaboration are supposed to be available to as many people. By effectively splitting the forum into such sections you get less people per area. Also, the people who are multilingual will have to watch more forums at the same time.

Whether we like the situation or not, some knowledge of English is absolutely necessary if you are serious (or even mildly interested) in electronics. There are MUCH better ways to improve your language skills than to look at a theme specific forum.

David

English surpassed Esperanto initial goals in an extreme and is slowly replacing native languages. There's a cultural isolation between people that understand English and those that don't. English takes stuff from lots of languages and uses a more simple syntax,  that's advantage for science.


 I also see when a non-native express in English, it  does in a less emotional and more logic way and that may help to focus on the task.

[Richard Crowley]

There are specific-language sections on the Arduino forum. The German and Italian seem to be the most popular, but even those are rather puny compared to the rest of the forum in English.  Is Google translate not sufficient for people who don't read English well enough?  I know machine-translation isn't that great, but when I have needed it to understand websites in other languages, it worked well enough to get the majority of the content.

One of my most favorite TV shows was a very interesting 7-part documentary series called "The Story of English". I learned many things, from it such as India being the largest English-speaking country, and there being more English-speakers in China than there are in the USA.  And most of us probably already knew that English is the international language of air traffic control, etc. I think I will watch it again.... https://youtu.be/7FtSUPAM-uA?list=PL6D54D1C7DAE31B36

I happen to have been born and raised in an English-speaking country, so it was the default for me.  Although I will probably need to start building up my Spanish vocabulary again (after decades of dis-use). I may be handling technical operations for a Spanish-language TV station, and maybe a whole international satellite network.  It was pretty "exciting" to run audio for a live TV talk show in Spanish, especially when they started taking random phone calls on the show.

[miguelvp]

So who doubles Antonio Banderas when the movie is shown in Spain? does he do it?

Yeah, kind of random but I always wondered. I guess I'll have to watch a movie he is on in Spanish

[Richard Crowley]

There is still a significant amount of ADR (Additional Dialog Replacement) or "looping" as they used to call it.  Where actors would come into a small sound studio and watch their shots on a screen and reproduce their dialog to be recorded "clean".  With that kind of mechanism, it is a rather simple thing to record the dialog in any other language.  Of course it is a cliche to see badly-dubbed movies like many early Japanese Samurai movies where they made no apparent attempt to match the words to the mouth movements.   

I remember staying at the apartment of a FOAF in Darmstadt where they were watching a movie on TV one evening. It was a Clint Eastwood movie dubbed into German and the voice actor they used for Eastwood had a high-pitched, reedy voice that just made it ridiculous to watch.  I had to leave the room because I kept laughing (it wasn't a comedy movie).

[madires]

South Swahili or maybe Klingon?  What's the problem? Simply ask about the best shops/places/whatever in your region. For example, someone else just asked about shops in Germany and got a lot of feedback.

[ElektroQuark]

So who doubles Antonio Banderas when the movie is shown in Spain? does he do it?

Yes, he does.

[timofonic]

And he's awfully bad dubbig himself. But he's also a very overvalued actor, too.

[PE1RKI]

please no

[Monkeh]

Seems that SMF system doesn't like CJK.

I doubt it has any problem with it, but the database is not appropriately configured for English, let alone CJK.

??

oops, I broke it with an industry standard symbol again.

[electr_peter]

I had some messages with the forum in the past. While this may be beneficial for some and some purposes, I do not support this idea. Few reasons:

• By share numbers and topic diversity, sections of other languages would not be as interesting.
• This forum has set very high standard on quality (no comparison to local forums).
• This forum is intended for (mostly) international technical topics. Discussion of local topics are not interesting for majority of forum users.
• If one cannot ask or write in English, he/she will find more help in local forums, not here.
• Not everyone has good language skills even in mother language (just look at local forums to understand the issue...). This relates to both grammar and question formulation.
• Buy/Sell section should not to be localised. What is the point?
• New moderators have to be appointed.
• There is a risk that local forums can move/port discussions to this forum as a base.
• Local events for forum members can be organised via specialised posts or local forums.

[elgonzo]

Seems that SMF system doesn't like CJK.

I doubt it has any problem with it, but the database is not appropriately configured for English, let alone CJK.

Nope, it rather points towards the configuration of SMF and not an limitation/issue with the DBMS. Since version 2.0 it has UTF-8 support. For whatever reason it is not enabled here - perhaps due to an upgrade from an older SMF version, i don't know... Personally i find UTF-8 support for this forum not that utterly important. The few times i had faced the lack of support for international characters (last that comes to my mind: Stanis?aw Lem) were not really a hindrance for communicating in proper gibberish English

[Monkeh]

Seems that SMF system doesn't like CJK.

I doubt it has any problem with it, but the database is not appropriately configured for English, let alone CJK.

Nope, it rather points towards the configuration of SMF and not an limitation/issue with the DBMS. Since version 2.0 it has UTF-8 support. For whatever reason it is not enabled here - perhaps due to an upgrade from an older SMF version, i don't know... Personally i find UTF-8 support for this forum not that utterly important. The few times i had faced the lack of support for international characters (last that comes to my mind: Stanis?aw Lem) were not really a hindrance for communicating in proper gibberish English

And yet, the forum character set is UTF-8.

[elgonzo]

Even with UTF-8 it won't be able to support both Japanese and Chinese properly. At best it can be correct for the user's OS language and broken for the other. Unicode is badly broken that way.

That would be an issue with either Unicode code points or the lack of appropriate fonts on the clients (machines running the web browser), and not an issue with the forum software nor the underlying DBMS...

[elgonzo]

And yet, the forum character set is UTF-8.

Oops, you are right. I see here in my forum session a JavaScript variable smf_charset set to "UTF-8".

The fact that international characters are replaced by question marks points towards a Unicode code point --> ASCII/local codepage conversion (mangled UTF-8 sequences would not result in question marks...). The charset of the DBMS not being set to UTF-8 should not affect UTF-8 sequences transmitted as simple strings (8-bit wide chars). I guess, either a Unicode-->ASCII/local codepage conversion happens somewhere in the forum software, or i was misled/confused by the SMF documentation and SMF actually transmits Unicode strings (and not UTF-8) to the DBMS, or something... (SMF is written in PHP, i just noticed... argh... that explains all...)  In the end it doesn't matter that much, i guess

[PeterFW]

Bad idea, that seperates information, knowledge and users.
Everyone needs to speak english, if they do not, they have to learn.

There is nothing gained and much lost when you seperate people by language.

In my ideal world everything and everyone on the internet would use english, well... it has not to be english but everyone should use the same language.
Take a look at esperanto, interesing idea but not feaseable.
English is a decent standard, it is very easy to learn compared to other leanguages.

[BlueBill]

A multi language forum would be unmanageable.