[Foundation-l] multilingual mailing list

[Austin Hair]

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 10:21 PM, Casey Brown <lists at caseybrown.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 4:17 PM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Do we have a multilingual mailing list?
>>
>> I think it would be a good idea to have a general discussion list
>> where anyone, especially newbies, can write in their preferred
>> language.
>> Someone in our community is sure to understand and be able to respond.
>
> This *is* a multilingual list.  All languages are welcome here.  The
> issue with Meria's messages have been that she's just been saying the
> same thing over and over again:  "please write in Spanish".  If she
> wanted to respond to something in Spanish, that would have been fine.

Casey's right—this is, in fact, the official policy of the list. You
can write in whatever language you want, just don't expect much of a
reply if you do it in a language that only three other people on the
list understand.

My reply to Maria was overly simplistic and dismissive, but only
because (a) she was just writing "I don't speak English, Spanish
please," and (b) she did it like six times. If my head were back in
California, I could perhaps have given her a better reply, and it's
somewhat regrettable that my Spanish skills went down the toilet when
I moved to the (no longer Spanish) Netherlands.

(As an aside, does anyone know the appropriate Spanish verb for "to
moderate" in this context? I didn't actually ban her, I just couldn't
come up with a better word.)

Austin