About language support on tech forums (fora)

[mr tribute]

I have noticed that many tech fora have "Foreign language boards". I am curious what purpose these serve. From my perspective it's like this:

I see a question asked in a language I don't understand or don't know well enough to reply in that language. So to reply to a question I have to use a translator.

My reaction is then something like: "why should I be the one using a translator when the person posing the question could have done it and thereby increasing the chance of getting replies?"

I'm actually against "English everywhere", but with translator tech one could argue that it would make sense for a tech forum to standardize on one language. This isn't a suggestion; I'm just thinking aloud.

OK. I think I understand why there are "Foreign language boards". So that people can write to other native speakers of a particular language. The problem is that there seems to be only one large "Other language" group on English tech fora and it's the German language. Seldom you see a question in French and Spanish is also quite rare. Portuguese and Russian are also rare on English tech fora. Mandarin, not so much activity...

For "Other languages" to really make sense at least one dev must speak that language fluently I think. Otherwise, "Other languages" is just extra work for the devs (and mods) that the users could have done instead (translation).

Just food for thought. It doesn't really matter, but sometimes I feel sorry for people who don't take the time to translate their posts into English, because they would get more replies.

[moonbat]

It becomes necessary when the primary users of a given project only speak one language, say, English. Else there's plenty of native language tech boards that people can visit for generic tech queries in their own language.

[Moonchild]

The point is to provide a place for people to discuss things in their own language with other community members, without those languages necessarily becoming intermixed with the main language spoken by the primary users. It's a convenience thing.
For example we have quite a few German-speaking or Russian-speaking users here; it is often easier to have quick questions answered by fellow users who are also native in those languages than to go through several translation layers (with possible "lost in translation" errors), even if the main devs can't necessarily understand the languages spoken.