[Foundation-l] multilingual mailing list

[Milos Rancic]

On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 16:32, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12 March 2011 14:53, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>> A really (and not only formally) multilingual list is the new iberocoop
>> list, started after the last Wikimania
>> (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Iberocoop ).
>
> I didn't know about that list. That's very interesting - thanks for
> the heads up! It is a lot easier to manage a multilingual discussion
> where all the languages are, to at least some extent, mutually
> intelligible, though. It would be useful to hear what measures, if
> any, that list has taken to make things easier, though. They might
> work more generally.

Willing to hear how Basque language is used on that list.

In such situation, ordinary person has to choose between two choices:
(1) to make one time effort and learn English; no matter how it is bad
at the beginning, it becomes better and better because of its usage;
(2) to make constant efforts in combining Google Translate with
partial intelligibility or the other language.

Besides that, there will be always less equal languages. For example,
any list for Former Yugoslavia may start with the aim to have all
languages, but, the language usage flow goes in this way: Albanians
will never try to use their language, as it is obviously that almost
nobody else understands it. Serbians don't use Cyrillic, as it makes
problems to the younger generations of Croats and Slovenes. Then,
Macedonians start not to use Cyrillic, but as Cyrillic is the only
script of Macedonian language, they tend to write Serbian in Latin.
Finally, Slovenes realize that it is stupid that just they don't use
Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, so they switch on it. Usually non native
speakers will make mistakes, but it would be more understandable than
if everybody writes in their native languages. It is not poetry, but
using words from Latin and English, as well as other internationalisms
makes discourse very rich.

Consequently, before very good automatic translators -- which means
that it should be approximately 100%; if efficiency is 99%, there will
be ~5 errors in this email, which could significantly change the
meaning of it -- lingua franca is superior model.

That doesn't mean that we should prohibit usage of any other language.
Yes, someone could make very good points in Spanish and someone else
could translate them into English. However, at this point of time,
English is the only reasonable option.