h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"I think it's true, though (there may be the odd post, but it's
definitely nowhere on our radar, unlike German et al)."

Well, you could start by following the links I gave. Peta definitely should know. And while it's difficult for me to find anything since it's hidden, I remember to have seen quite a few posts in Welsh. At least it looked Welsh to me, but of course I don't know as I never understood it. But enough about that, personally I'm much more interested in Danish postings.

(For a translation of the Welsh at <./>A500077</.>, see <./>A499980</.>.
Oh no, wait, that's hidden too because it's in Danish. )

If you read through the backlog of the main non-english thread sombody did list all the points that h2g2 may be in breech of with regards to the first link I posted.

I am not a lawyer, you are not a lawyer - but I know (and I suspect you know) the Welsh language enjoys condidrable legal protection which is why I think it would be irresponcible not to seek a legal opinion.

Tell you what, HappyDude, *you* contact the lawyers, as I believe that h2g2 has no legal obligation to provide Welsh language support. If the lawyers tell you that h2g2 does have such an obligation in law, then we will have to look at employing a Welsh-speaking moderator. If not, then they'll no doubt explain why.

You can contact the BBC lawyers through the BBC's Feedback forms on the main site. I'm looking forward to hearing their response; tell them I sent you, if you like.

Simpost. I'll reply in a moment Peta!

irresponcible and arrogant

"If you read through the backlog of the main non-english thread sombody did list all the points that h2g2 may be in breech of with regards to the first link I posted."

Can't find it in this Conversation... or the other one, HappyDude. Got a link to hand?

Nope.
Legally speaking (something I do know a little about), you are the complainant in this case.
It is for you to prove, in the 'balance of probability' that Mark and the staff at H2G2 (the respondents) are in the wrong as regard this legal point.

"the Welsh language enjoys condidrable legal protection which is why I think it would be irresponcible not to seek a legal opinion."

I've checked the BBC Producers' Guidelines and they make no mention of a legal obligation to offer a Welsh Service on every, or in fact, on *any* BBC webpage. The Producers' Guidelines have undoubtedly been checked by the lawyers, as well as by all of the Welsh speaking Producers in the BBC. If we had a legal obligation to provide a Welsh service someone would undoubtedly have pointed it out by now.

And if, by some amazing fluke no one had spotted this glaring error, and we had an obligation to support the Welsh language across the whole of the BBC why should this apply just to postings on community sites? Wouldn't it mean that we had to offer a translation of every single BBC webpage? And why even restrict it to the website? We could be obliged to produce a Welsh version of the main BBC news, or a Welsh version of every BBC sitcom. Why don't we? Do you think that it's because it's totally apparent that it's completely unfeasible to expect this from any major broadcasting company? Maybe we should start petitioning ABC to produce a version of all their programmes in native American Indian? Nah, that would just be silly...

F77636?thread=190898&skip=80&show=20 post 88
F77636?thread=190898&post=2133435#p2133435 post 143 & post 155

nice to know you read everyone’s complaints carefully...

Blimey!

A couple of questions for you Mark, and indeed Peta.

1) How much effort is being put into recruiting bi-lingual moderators?

2) How important is it to the h2g2 editors to enable Welsh-language postings and links to Welsh-language sites?

3) How important is it to the h2g2 editors to enable German, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian postings and links to sites in those languages?

Ok - so that is 3 questions, but there you go.

The reason I put in those languages in that order is because that is my impression of the rough order of the user-numbers for non-English languages, I apologise if I have missed any out.

*trying to be part of the solution*
*sorry that I have to sign myself this way again*

a monoglot who travels called Ben

As I have posted before - message boards unlike oter media allow people to talk to each other and banning two (or more) Welsh speakers from commincating with each other in Welsh (even via the medium of a message board) could put the BBC & h2g2 on shaky ground.

would it really take that much effort to talk the bbc legal team ?

"would it really take that much effort to talk the bbc legal team ?"

As much effort as it would for you to fill in the relevant form on the BBC site and to substantiate your claims, which (I have said) I don't believe for one minute to be legally sound.

first I never claimed anything - I just raised the possibility of this being the case and 2nd its not me that is risking bringing the BBC into disrepute and a posable legal action against the BBC by a refusal to check on a posable breech of the law that has been brought to there attention.

sorry, last post should of said "possible disrepute"

Actually, Peta, a significant number of programmes *are* dubbed into Welsh, and indeed Gaelic. Admittedly a high proportion are children's programmes, and a lot of them tend to be under the wing of C4Cymru (or is it C4TV?)

And where I live - a good 60 miles from Wales, I can pick up Welsh Radio from both the BBC and from Independent Radio.

I strongly suggest that you ask people who live in or near Wales what the programming is like before making blanket statements from London about the Principality. And mutatis mutandum Scotland and everywhere else outside the M25. (That is Latin, btw, and not rude either).

HappyDude's comment that this is about stopping Brits INTERACTING with other Brits is the most valid one in the entire thread, and does not yet seem to have been answered.

Gang canny.

Ben

PS - when you come to answer my questions can I suggest that you copy the questions and include them in the post - it is too confusing when the reply is over the fold to just post answers to the numbers as y'all have a habit of doing.

B

Hi Ben,

"1) How much effort is being put into recruiting bi-lingual moderators?"

The moderation company will charge us more if we ask them to recruit translators for us, because they will quite understandably have to pay the bi-lingual moderators more if language skills are part of the job specification. So this isn't included in the moderation requirement when companies tender for the job.

It would also be pointless asking them to start hiring bi-lingual moderators. The current moderation tools don't allow us to direct foreign language postings to a specific moderator - the moderators see them in the order they are posted - so we have no way of pointing the right languages to the right translator.

"2) How important is it to the h2g2 editors to enable Welsh-language postings and links to Welsh-language sites?"

We've never been approached by a native Welsh speaker and been asked to enable Welsh conversations, so it isn't something that we could possibly consider to be important at the moment, there isn't the demand. We'd almost certainly consider including a relevant link to a Welsh site on an Edited Guide Entry, because it would be editorially justified.

"3) How important is it to the h2g2 editors to enable German, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian postings and links to sites in those languages?"

How important is a bit of a tricky thing to define. How important compared to what? (I'm not trying to be pedantic Ben, just trying to answer the question truthfully!)

Jobs are prioritised. We tried the German pilot of moderating by email and manually putting the postings back up, but it is far too labour intensive from this end. We need new tools to enable posts to be moderated via the web by translator volunteers, but we don't have them, so starting now just isn't an option. So how important isn't really a definition that I'd use, it's irrelevant, it's just not possible at the moment.

"HappyDude's comment that this is about stopping Brits INTERACTING with other Brits is the most valid one in the entire thread, and does not yet seem to have been answered."

We're not stopping them communicating, we are simply saying that to communicate in Welsh on the BBC website you need to use the BBC's Welsh board (which is not here yet, true, but it's on its way). Thus the BBC is not preventing Welsh language communication, they are simply enabling it in the most reasonable way possible - ie on a board where the Welsh moderators are working.

Given this, it is legally completely academic whether h2g2 supports Welsh, and indeed, I could easily prove that it would be unreasonable to expect us to employ Welsh-speaking moderators, given that we currently don't have any demand for Welsh communication from our users.

Is that answered now?

Peta, first of all: I haven't said that it wasn't true what you said! But I really think you should have seen such conversations. As I've said before, I haven't got much of a chance to find any as they are moderated.
When I said she had asked you a few days ago, I'll admit that I was exaggerating. She asked about languages in F615?thread=190121 but didn't mention the Embassy, though the languages she mentioned were some of the ones already used there. I'm quite sure that she's been talking to you on site, but what I know most about is email communication which I unfortunately will have difficulties documenting. (It can be done, but I'm not sure it's worth it for any of us). As far as I remember - I use this wording though it's dangerous - we (the Embassy staff represented by Kumetanzuka) sent you a number of mails, but you had - as I've already mentioned - good reasons for ignoring us for a while. Then you replied. Personally I still feel that you ignored us more than you should, but that may be because I (we) didn't agree with you. However, the reason for that feeling was the same as I get now. That you might have replied to us, but haven't really bothered to look at what we were talking about. I may very well be wrong, and I hope you won't take offence, but it has often looked to me as if you've never actually visited the pages for the Embassy. I know you're busy, but as we started that project months before the Beeb took over and have tried a number of times both then and later to help with the question about languages at h2g2, it is frustrating to have that feeling when you at the same time tells that you are/have been investigating *all* possibilities.
"My understanding was that the Terran Embassy was offering an off-site translation service, in order to get foreign language postings onto h2g2 in English."
That's one thing we've talked about. There were others. Personally I more or less gave up a long time ago, so excuse me if I can't remember them. The point is that we offered some ideas and were eager to discuss the whole thing, but - and again this is my personal feeling and is not meant to offend or attack - you were not interested/able (bloody lawyers) to discuss it with us. But as I see it, you *should* know that there have been Welsh posts at h2g2.

Rather off-topic and not very interesting, I'm sorry. I don't think there's much point in continuing this part of the discussion, just felt that I had to give an answer now I started it.



Oh, and sorry that it took me so long to reply. I'm not English and writing a post like this would be hard for me even in my own language. If I've said anything I shouldn't, blame it on the lousy Danish education system!

Hi Ben,

I was just replying as you posted!

I'm not saying that they shouldn't be translated, or that a service shouldn't be offered, of course it should. I think the BBC makes a reasonable effort to provide programming in Welsh and that's a good thing. I was responding to the question of whether we're legally obliged to provide a service, and I think that it's apparent that it would be totally unreasonable to expect any company or corporation to do so; not unless everyone wanted the license fee to treble!

As far as I know, yes that phrase again, we haven't stopped anyone from interacting with anyone else. If a Welsh speaker, or preferably a number of Welsh speakers contact me with a genuine desire to speak in Welsh I'll reconsider the situation, but it hasn't happened so far.

(Polite notice: Bear in mind if anyone thinks that it would be a jolly jape to rush off, contact every Welsh person they know and get them to post pleading posts just to test the Eds out, we won't find it at all amusing. Don't try it. Thanks.)