The language barrier

I see many discussion here and on github in France.

It’s OK to use your mother language. The boring thing is, that non-france speaker are excluded :wink: I don’t speak English very well either. But it is the language that can reach the most people.

Here we have the optional tags “en” and “fr” … But they are not used every time. Rather, they are usually not used.

I don’t know what we can do here. But I think that the amount of French in this project will discourage people.

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Indeed that’s something important and it’s good that your raise your voice about it … I too am suspecting that many non-french people ending up on the forum are not very enthusiast seeing the number of post in french (I would run away too if ended up on a forum with a majority of post in german or whatever language I don’t speak)

We discussed this a few time in the past but it wasn’t very clear what to do … clearly the project is historically quite french, but it’s not either like we can suddenly order everybody to speak english (also in France overall, unfortunately there’s quite a culture of not being enthusiast in reading english, and even less write/speak it - but that’s a big discussion beyond the scope of this topic)

Sooo yeah idk I ended up accepting the status quo where we are half-french / half-english and maybe over time we can drift to a more english-dominated project, but that’s kind of a egg-and-chicken problem ? :s

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About forum, i see several solutions:

Several possibilities:

  • Encourage users to post in english
    • ⊖ i am not sure it will work (as support template…)
  • Activate Discourse Translate
    • ⊖ we need to choose between gafam or yandex). Contribute to the plugin to support deepl seems a bad idea as deepl cost €20.00 per 1,000,000 translated characters, with tons of logs it could be difficult.
    • ⊖ Is this solution fix the problem of french title every where in our forum. Probably no.
  • Create fr.forum.yunohost.org and en.forum.yunohost.org and install, maintain, and answer on 2 discourse…
    • ⊕ could be a good way to have new voluntary doing support (in their own language) ?
    • ⊖ more maintainance and cost (if we want support other languages, maintainance and costs grows too)
    • ⊖ it could be difficult to follow several forum for people who do support frequently.
    • ⊖ it separate completely the communities (see this arguments: https://meta.discourse.org/t/inline-translation-of-posts-into-another-language/25575 )
  • Setup content language plugin (https://thepavilion.io/t/content-languages/2545)
    • ⊕ registered users can select their languages and get only those messages
    • ⊕ we can force users to indicate the language of their message :slight_smile:
    • ? it’s probably possible to do some things to display the forum with the good language prioritize (from browser pref or the origin of the user (doc in french or in english))

About git, i think it should be in english too.

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(Didnt realize that @jedie was also talking about Github repo, which is clearly a bug if stuff happens to be in french (except maybe a few comments occasionally). @jedie : do you have specific example in mind ?)

I understand the problem and to try to help I usually post my messages in both EN and FR. I think it is good for most people like that. (This was inspired by the announcements posts :wink: )
If we could afford it a plugin using Deepl would be very usefull, as their translations are very good!

Well, to be honest to everyone I too was considering to write something about it but I thought it might be ‘heard’ wrong to some people so i hold off. I end up translating some posts in English to find some solutions to the problems I face which is not very helpful most of the times.

It would be nice though to have a consensus that everyone uses English which is more universally used. :slight_smile:

It’s the forum and some of content/comments etc. on github…

In other forums there are clear sections for different languages. Here we have only the tags, but often not used and here and there mixed languages.

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I don’t mine one bit. It’s great that there are many languages in the world.

I can see it being not useful though if I have a problem and am looking for the solution. A few times I’ve searched an error message in English and come up with many French posts about it.

Maybe the forum could just translate post titles at least? It’s a tough problem.

I think the best thing could just be to improve the English and French documentation. If a problem is brought up many times in French, and it’s important, maybe add to the docs? Or translate a key portion of that important post to English so others can search the forum to solve their own problem too?

PS. I appreciate that this kind of discussion, which has the potential to inflame passion, is being discussed in such a civil manner.

<3 the Yunohost community!

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Yes, searching is also a problem: In “Advanced Search” you can add “en” to “Tagged”… But that is not a solution either. The most threads are not tagged. And sometimes a “en” tagged thread contains non-english stuff…

The documentation is another thing. The language problem doesn’t exists there. This is very well solved, there. But i think the structure is not really good. It is difficult to find the information. But i think we should discuss this in a other thread :wink: EDIT: About homepage, goto: Hidden information on YunoHost Homepage

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Yesterday we discussed about this topic and the forum during the contributors meeting, and we decided to add the module to force users to indicate the content language of their message. English or French users would be able to indicate languages they want to see in their account. We probably open the forum to new language in future if we found some people to read and answer regularly to this topic.

All users are encouraged to ask for support in english if they can, in order to help YunoHost to be adopted in other languages. However, as YunoHost wants to be usable for a general public, we think it’s important to let users to choice to speak or read an other language than english if they need to.

On my side, sometimes i wrote a part of message in english and the other part in french, it’s not voluntary, it’s just sometimes, i have phone or discussion in french in the same time i answer to your topic. Feel free to ask for a translation, or use deepl in that case.

Core PR are all in english. About issues, about 20 issues on 500 currently opened are in french, feel free to contribute if someone wants to take time to translate it (or simply close it if the issue is fixed…). Code comments and translation string are in english too.

I don’t watch status about apps packaging PR and issues language.

About documentation, feel free to contribute to this topic if you found some doc unavailable in english by giving some link and say the english translation is missing:

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I’m totally fine with that but i could not find any way to create a new topic : always got an error You must include at least 1 content_languages tag. and nowhere to select it…

Yes i have some problem to configure the module, you should be able to create your topic now. Sorry.

I am going to continue to search a solution with this module.

Indeed, here is an example : https://community.e.foundation/
The global categories are in English, and then there is a category for each language. I think it’s a good way to go too.

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Looks like a good solution.

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It’s alright i found a solution in the meantime :smiley:

I finally fixed the most important issue with the multilingual module :slight_smile: (some things could be improved).

So now:

  • Each user that create a topic should select a language (if no a popup appears and ask one lang at most)
  • You can configure your content languages preferences in your account
  • I have tried to autodetect previous message lang with the code under… It’s not very accurate, but i think it’s a good start:
    INSERT INTO topic_tags (topic_id, tag_id, created_at, updated_at) 
    (SELECT topic_id, 555 as tag_id, NOW() as created_at, NOW() as updated_at FROM posts WHERE raw LIKE '%é%' OR raw LIKE '%à%' OR raw LIKE '%è%' OR raw LIKE '%ç%' OR raw LIKE '%ê%') 
    ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING;

    INSERT INTO topic_tags (topic_id, tag_id, created_at, updated_at) 
    (SELECT topic_id, 553 as tag_id, NOW() as created_at, NOW() as updated_at FROM posts WHERE raw LIKE '%i''m%' OR raw LIKE '% I %') 
    ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING;

Note some feature from multilingual plugin still does not work. The most broken feature is the ability to select the lang if you have no account… Or to give it via a parameter in URL. I will continue to search how to fix it.

I see also a regression, it’s not anymore possible to send direct message…

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well - this were exactly my thoughts when i first saw this forum. I am quite used to language specific subsections in other forums - but the whole thing a mix at least for me also was a bit off a… well - a turnoff. Never saw something like that in other communities. Looks like a french one (with some english writers) to me. So i agree with jedie - that was my first impression here to. Couldn’t follow some of the topics i read cause i hand to translate parts of the discussions when someone started to write french.

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https://libretranslate.com/ seems to be a Libre replacement to Deepl.

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Yes. And translation via deepl and Co. is not a solution…

At least: All threads should be stay with the initial language.

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Is there a way to indicate a language tag while writing a reply to a message without tag , or when writing direct messages? Like adding [FR], [EN] in the subject (in case of direct messages)?