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

In an ideal world.... should h2g2 be multilingual?

How would this work?

WOULD this work?

Ben

not while we are on the Beeb!!!

>>In an ideal world.... should h2g2 be multilingual?

Yes.

I'll be interested to hear how this could work. The main impediment I see is having the resources to PR/edit and to moderate other languages.

can't it be auto-translated??

Auto-translation's a very hit and miss affair, though.

I think it should be multilingual. I wonder how much it *would* be anyway, even were it allowed. There's a vast archive of material already existing in English, so if someone's searching for things in Mandarin or Urdu the site would likely go under their radar anyway. Purely because of precedent it's likely that the vast majority of contributions would continue in English - so I don't think it would be a major issue.

Which wouldn't be an issue KB?

Would researchers need permission to post in non-English? Entries? Threads? Or would we have approved languages based on our ability to edit/moderate them?

Sorry, that could have been clearer - what I meant was that I can't see there being such an increase in the other languages used that it will make a massive difference to the user experience of the site.

Hypothetically speaking, wouldn't it be just too to have a built in babelfish feature?

Multilingual definitely gets my vote - we used to have the Polyglot Plaza before Auntie Beeb. And I've sometimes gotten away with posting in 'Scandinavian' when I happened to be lucky enough to post with a Scandinavian speaking Moderator online (when the Beeb could afford multi-lingual Moderators).

KB, I imagine there will be bi/multilingual researchers who speak English who want to be able to write and talk in languages other than English. I don't see it so much as about numbers, but more about what resources we have here to manage that. Can we moderate sedition in Welsh? Defamatory comments in German? Anything in Scots? If someone wants to converse in French, presumably we need enough moderators to cover those conversations each day. That's a big commitment.

I'd guess that German will be the easiest to sort because we already have German speaking researchers here who are well involved in the place.

##Can we moderate sedition in Welsh?##

twll dyn

The best thing I can suggest is to see how other sites do it. There are plenty of case studies if anyone wants to do them.

Moderation's important, but it's not the be all and end all. Most of the moderation which currently takes place seems to be for breaching BBC guidelines rather than anything else.

##Most of the moderation which currently takes place seems to be for breaching BBC guidelines ##

if we win the bid aren't we keeping the Beeb guidlines as a sort of starting safety net frame work untill we get up and running??

The main moderation issue I see is protecting the site from being sued for publishing anything defamatory or otherwise illegal. Unfortunately that means we (whoever is running the place) need to be able to understand everything that gets posted here.

*

twll dyn

Ok, so we need to moderate for Welsh rudeness as well as sedition

whats rude about a manhole???

No one will be posting anything in Chinese* or Urdu until the codebase has been updated to use Unicode. Even Welsh can be tricky enough. I don't think w-with-circumflex exists in ISO-8859-1.

TRiG.

* The Mandarin/Cantonese/whatever distinction applies only to the spoken languages. They're all written the same.**

** Actually, there are two ways of writing: Chinese, and Simplified Chinese (three if you include Pinyin). But either of the written languages can be used for any of the spoken languages.

It's all in how it's said apparently Taff.

my great aunt only spoke welsh, the water board were putting in sewers, and the young official tried to explain to her how they had to install a manhole cover in her front lawn??????

she chased him down the road, trying to beat him with her cane

"aren't we keeping the Beeb guidlines as a sort of starting safety net frame work untill we get up and running?"

Not all of them, I hope. For instance, I'd like to scrap the restrictions on election discussion as soon as we're shot of the Beeb.