This idea was briefly discussed during the lost week-end, and I wanted to mention it again.
It seems to me it would be a good idea to open such a forum for several reasons. There are a number of fluent Spanish speakers on the SDMB, including some native speakers, who would probably enjoy using it, or discussing issues that are more related to the Spanish-speaking world than those usually discussed.
There are also a number of people who have some command of Spanish, are learning it, or are interested in it who would probably like to have a shot at practising it or asking questions about it (like me, for instance).
Given that the board is now both free and indexed in search engines, this could attract new posters from Spanish speaking countries (or even Hispanic people living in the USA who are primarily Spanish speakers), which would be a good thing in itself but also would bring in new perspectives for a board that is currently very US-centric or at best Anglo-centric.
I must say that ideally I would like an “all-languages” forum, but I assume this would be a no-no because there would be moderation issues. On the other hand, finding moderators who are fluent in Spanish shouldn’t be that difficult, I suspect.
So, I’m asking the administrators if opening such a forum is an idea that could be considered (Of course, I’d like to read the opinion of regular posters, but it would be a moot point if the administrators were stating : “There isn’t a snow ball chance in hell we would open a non English-speaking forum”).
You could have an international forum that was only open to foreign language use for a certain subset of languages for which a moderator could be found.
One year of grade school and one year of high school Spanish. Yet despite living in California I still can’t speak a word. Well, maybe a word.
Three years of high school French. Sadly, though at one time I could claim that my French was just utterly wretched, now I’m afraid it has withered to the virtually nonexistant.
So I’m afraid I must register my displeasure at this notion clairobscur, and I must do so out of nothing but sheer selfishness ;). It’d drive me to distraction knowing that intelligent, informed members of this community were having interesting discussions on international or European issues and I couldn’t participate.
Yet at the same time, there are some topics of debate that English (mostly from the USA) do not seem interested. Don’t you notice that sometimes, in some threads, the POV is expected or mainly from the US, and it takes a while for someone from another place to chime in (and give a different perspective)? You’re right, that in those cases, the language shouldn’t matter. But I feel that in some cases it does.
And speaking in something not so serious and more eh… social?, all those threads asking for music of a certain type. Well, I’ll love to chime in, but most of the songs I know are either in Spanish or Portuguese.
I would love to see a spanish forum. I spend so much time reading to my strictly spanish-reading SO from this board, I think he’d love it if he could read some for himself.
I don’t expect it will occur but it would be nice.
I think it’s a nice concept, and I’d like to see it myself. But I think the admins understandably want to have a good grasp of what’s going on in the forums and threads. If someone were being a jerk in a language the PTBs don’t speak, how would they know? Yes, someone could report the person, but the admin or mod has to (or should) look at the text to see whether the report is valid.
Personally I love the idea of a spanish forum, it would give me a more interactive opportunity to practice and learn. However, a valid arguement could also be made for Japanese, Mandarin, Esperanto, Latin and any other language. I can’t see making a forum for each of these and I certainly see disaster in a mixed bag forum for all of these (although the thoughts of multilingual discussions intrigue me, I have them all the time at work and it’s kind of weird in a good way*).
I really liked the linguistic threads in The Pit last weekend, perhaps they could be allowed in MPSIMS (the Dope catchall)? Moderation wouldn’t be as difficult as it seems as long as Mods are willing to run posts through Babelfish and can syntax exactly what is going on.
*Often my fellow employees come to me with complaints or issues and try to convey them in english. A lot of times the stresses of the situation combined with the limited english abilities makes them impossible to understand so I ask them to just tell me what’s wrong in spanish. Then we converse with them in spanish and me in english and work the issues out. Other times I get brave enough to try to converse in spanish and they respond by answering in english, these are a little bizarre but often pleasant and enlightening conversations. If all else fails I sit them down in my office, pull up Babelfish and we work things out that way.
I would really love a forum where we could all speak in different languages. Finding moderators would be a challenge, but not an insurmountable one. The foreign language threads during the FFA weekend were truly a blast.
I’m not so keen on the idea of a general foreign language one. The biggies like German, French, Japanese, etc might almost work, but the problem lies with the others. Let’s say we dig up a moderator for Bahasa Indonesian, another for Greek, another for Korean, and two or three other members who can speak those languages. Then we just have pages of short threads with two people talking to one another. Even the people who can speak one of those languages might find it dull having to trawl through the thing.
It is my understanding that bannings and suspensions are not made by individual moderators, but through consensus of the mod/admin staff. This consensus approach would be difficult if there were only one or two Spanish speaking moderators and no administrators.
Babelfish is essentially useless for getting an idiomatic sense of what’s going on, and totally useless for slang (and thus for the vast majority of insults, obscenities, and double entendres). A moderator who is not fluent in a language could never use it to moderate a forum.
I believe I’m the moderator most fluent in Spanish, but I’m not a native speaker. While I’m fairly familiar with Panamanian slang, this varies a lot between the many Spanish speaking countries. Just as in English, an innocuous word in one country can be a vile insult elsewhere. A Spanish forum would require at least a couple of native Spanish speaking moderators; they would virtually have to be bilingual in English as well in order to participate in discussions with the other moderators.
While an intriguing idea, given the practical difficulties, possibly limited audience, and many other issues competing for attention on the board, I’m afraid this is not likely to be a high priority at present.
I’d love to see a Spanish-language forum. But yeah, you’d probably need moderators fluent in a couple flavors of Spanish to cover a maximum amount of slang.
I must be underestimating the role of Moderating. It seems to me that if a post is reported as being problematic, it would not be too difficult, given not-native fluency, to figure out if moderation is necessary.
If someone gets away with hurling an insult, will the boards collapse? Wouldn’t a closer look at a post or a series of posts make trolling or other really problematic behavior obvious, regardless fo slang?
Do you have extensive experience in any foreign languange? As I have already pointed out, it could very well be, even for someone with a reasonable level of fluency. I think you are underestimating the complexities involved in interpreting posts in another language.
Frankly, we get a lot of second-guessing, nit-picking, and counter-interpretations on the part of some people now, even when all posts are in a single language. Trying to parse the exact intent for a non-native speaker just makes things that much more difficult.