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.