18 votes

What's the best way to make non-English posts on Tildes? Can you? Should you?

Posted by razorbeamz
Tags: ask.help, language, content

I'm guessing that it might just be that Tildes is an English only site, but as an avid language learner, I'd love to have a place to see and post non-English discussions.

Is there a best practice for making a non-English discussion? Is it simply not allowed? Is it allowed but discouraged?

4 comments

  1. cfabbro
    (edited )
    Link
    https://docs.tildes.net/philosophy/site-design#tildes-and-non-english-languages Right now, everything needs to be primarily in English please. Users communicating primarily in other languages...
    • Exemplary

    Tildes and non-English languages

    For now, Tildes supports only one language: English. Many of the site's goals will be difficult or impossible to work towards without being able to understand what's going on in a community, so for now everything needs to be primarily in English. This may change someday in the future, and if it does, the hierarchical groups could work very well for giving other languages their own set of groups.

    https://docs.tildes.net/philosophy/site-design#tildes-and-non-english-languages

    Right now, everything needs to be primarily in English please. Users communicating primarily in other languages would make it impossible for Deimos to effectively moderate the site. That doesn't mean you can't say "hi" or have a quick chat in other languages here, you can, but topics and huge comment threads in other languages are potentially problematic due to our inability to understand them.

    26 votes
  2. [2]
    marron12
    Link
    I'd love to have a place to do that too. One option I thought of would be to provide a translation. Just write in X language and put an English version below. Or run it through DeepL, or leave a...

    I'd love to have a place to do that too. One option I thought of would be to provide a translation. Just write in X language and put an English version below. Or run it through DeepL, or leave a link to DeepL so anyone can check the translation for themselves. (DeepL doesn't work with every language, but it does a really good job with quite a few.)

    I also thought about a group where people could ask questions about learning Spanish or German or whatever. You can get away with using mostly English for that, but there will of course be some words, phrases, or sentences in a different language.

    Maybe this just isn't the right place for that. I'm still trying to find a place and would be curious what others have found. Discord mostly hasn't worked out for me.

    5 votes
    1. Erolon
      Link Parent
      I agree that language learning communities would probably work well. They are mainly English with individual phrases or sentences in other languages.

      I agree that language learning communities would probably work well. They are mainly English with individual phrases or sentences in other languages.

      2 votes
  3. Monomate
    Link
    English not being my native language, I'd rather use this oportunity to practice my output. The Tildes community is still too small to expand to multiple languages, especially as there's only one...

    English not being my native language, I'd rather use this oportunity to practice my output. The Tildes community is still too small to expand to multiple languages, especially as there's only one true "mod" around. As much as I appreciate the "everyone is a mod" philosophy, I think more mods will eventually be necessary for some manual stuff.

    3 votes