Forum for non-English speakers?

I am a German living in Brazil for 16 years now, and nobody here recognize me as a stranger until I say something in Portuguese.
... the actual spoken language (specially the vocabulary) is in practice very different[1], and often lead to length useless discussions about who is right and who is not. ...

Even my son told me once (that time he was 6, now he’s 14): „Pai, você fala tudo errado. (Dad, you say everything wrong.)“ My answer was: „According to the Relativity Theory of Albert Einstein, this is a matter of the point of view, and from my point of view, my Portuguese is correct and the Brazilians are talking wrong.“ That was a joke, of course.

That said, I live in the state of São Paulo and I can tell that citizens from other regions in the north and north-west of Brazil, most of the time don’t understand me talking, while I had never any problems in the south of Brazil. Once, I gave a presentation, and in the audience some students of Argentina (± Spanish native language) were present. They told me afterwards, that they were able to understand my Portuguese better than that one of the presentations of my Brazilian colleagues.

We got also some colleagues in Portugal, and in conversations with them, neither I nor my Brazilian colleagues understand a lot, if the Portuguese don’t talk slow and take extra care to pronunciation. Sometimes we switched to English with them.

When it comes to written Portuguese, in my experience, the differences are non-essential, and I see no way how it could prevent the people to understand each other - except in cases of totally stubborn opposites, but this is a different story anyway.

There was a Brazilian FreeBSD User Group - which maintained mailing lists, which are dead for some time now. Perhaps it was too ambitious to provide extra mailing lists for every state in Brazil.


This is something to learn from. I assume one forum or one mailing list for all Portuguese dialects would have more chances to survive than to provide dozens, in order to accommodate for regional peculiarities. Here we are back to sort of rule #9: „We currently do not have enough resources to moderate international discussions, ..."
 
When it comes to written Portuguese, in my experience, the differences are non-essential, and I see no way how it could prevent the people to understand each other - except in cases of totally stubborn opposites, but this is a different story anyway.

As said a few times this is not about being able or not to understand but the willingness to do it. Brazilian and Portuguese forums and similar (unless with very few or more sophisticated participants) tends to become quite problematic with one side not willing to deal or beign associated with another. Once you open a Portuguese language forum and that is not heavy towards one of the sides (located in Portugal or Brazil for instace), this is just a matter of time for people from both sides start to ask for the separation hence almost everywhere, in similar circumstances, they are separated.
 
To give some insight about Brazilians and Portuguese real world relations, when I did a Master in Lisbon we were a class of about 25[1] more or less splited in half-half.

In the first moment the Portuguese colleagues tried to make the Brazilians visitants cozy, but after a couple of weeks there where a clear separation between both groups. The Brazilians never showed up in any "event"[2] of the Portuguese but did their own separated ones, and the Portuguese found them a bit uneducated in general

Long story short:

Brazilians -> I can't really deal with Portuguese, they are too different, too formal etc.
Portuguese -> WTF are those Brazilians? Annoying, unrespectful, uneducated etc.

I just used to hang with just one of these groups, and I will let you imagine which one. ;)

And look that was a Master level course. Can you imagine how things can go wrong with more random people.

[1] the number vary depending on the specific course.
[2] diners and such, and worse they always told they would go, to reserve their chair.
 
Brazilians -> I can't really deal with Portuguese, they are too different, too formal etc.
Portuguese -> WTF are those Brazilians? Annoying, unrespectful, uneducated etc.

OK, I have an idea. Many Brazilians who I met told me they would love to learn the German language. Usually I tell them, they should do how I did with learning my wrong Portuguese, namely arrange a German girl-friend or boy-friend and then start to talk German, and later on marry, of course, until death do you part.

So, let’s open a forum in German language for the Brazilians and the Portuguese. The advantage is, they would learn German what they anyway would have loved to do, without having the hassle of the marriage, and with the big advantage that nobody would recognize people living across the Atlantic and hemisphere. Isn’t that brillant, is it? 😇
 
obsigna, the downside of that is if they speak German better than your Portuguese. I used to be moderately fluent in Japanese, then married a Japanese woman whose English was better than my Japanese. In addition, her argument is that we live the in US. So, in the long time we've been married, my Japanese has gone way down hill. Also, of course, she chased away all the pretty girls who didn't speak English. :)
 
Beware, I am joking.

@obsigna, the downside of that is if they speak German better than your Portuguese.

Well, here we are back to the Relativity Theorie - „better“ is so much relative.

Now seriously. Somebody wants an international forum - go ahead and do it baby! Then publish the link, e.g. here. I promise, I will have a look. I guess, this is what gh_origin wanted to suggest.
 
For an example of how well (not) used dedicated foreign language forums might be, have a gander at https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org which has sections for Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian.

Also note that some users post in English (with answers to questions) in those foreign language forums. I'm sure I've done it. Many of the people answering in their foreign langiage also participate in the more extensive English forums too.
 
For an example of how well (not) used dedicated foreign language forums might be, have a gander at https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org which has sections for Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian.

Also note that some users post in English (with answers to questions) in those foreign language forums. I'm sure I've done it. Many of the people answering in their foreign langiage also participate in the more extensive English forums too.
On other forums, they posted in such boxes with the native language of that box, but via Google Translate. That make me wonder why the users in said language don't just use Google Translate to communicate with the rest in English and eliminate these boxes, as they are no longer needed.

It's very simple. If the user base of such language is big enough, they could be self hosted (have their own forum). If they have to stick as part of a larger English community, that's mean they are not big enough. When it come to problems, they still need the help of the people from the English community. Then why don't just use Google Translate and why have these boxes from the beginning?
 
... Then why don't just use Google Translate and why have these boxes from the beginning?

Ten years ago, I was the director of a small international development center of chemical products. We were working on projects with highly skilled chemical engineers and doctorates from all over the world. The lab results were to be reported into a laboratory journal, and I forced everybody to write the reports in their respective native language.

Why:
  1. Writing in foreign language is error prone and takes much more time, which could otherwise be spent for running the next trial series in the lab.

  2. Reading and understanding a text in foreign language is easy by using said translation services. I even wrote a free desktop application for macOS which does instant translation while reading or writing text in any application.
    https://obsigna.com/Downloads/en/InstantTranslator/
Bottom line, while I myself don’t have much problems using English in any correspondence, I would ease the rule of forcing English on these forums. Perhaps for a test, on how it works out, there could be one International General forum, and here I would allow mixing of any language. Somebody could ask something in Icelandic and gets responses in Russian, French, Portuguese (of course with the dialects of Brazil, Portugal and Angola), Japanese, Italian, ..., and English would be allowed as well. Wouldn’t that be a fantastic experiment? I assume there would be a number of volunteers for the moderation of the different languages.

The text-encoding here is already UTF-8 and so we won’t see much problems with non-latin text.

For example the last sentence above in Japanese by courtesy of the Google Translator:

ここでのテキストエンコーディングはすでにUTF-8であるため、ラテン語以外のテキストに関する多くの問題は発生しません。
 
For the sake of the explanation, mixing Brazilians and Portuguese in a single portuguese-language forum sometimes work well, sometimes went pretty bad. For starters the actual spoken language (specially the vocabulary) is in practice very different[1], and often lead to length useless discussions about who is right and who is not.
Such problems are not exclusive to Portuguese. It probably happens in every language that has different dialects with different words (for the same things) or different meanings (for the same words).

For example, the German language spoken in Austria is different from the one in Lower Saxony, which in turn is different from the Cologne region, and so on. When I visit South Baden, I have serious problems understanding people at all. And when I visited Munich (Bavaria) for the first time in my life, I entered a Bus and asked the driver if he sells day tickets. I could read the answer from his face, but I didn’t understand what he was saying. In fact, many Bavarians are able to speak standard German (or “High German”), but are often unwilling to do so, even when they clearly notice that you’re a tourist. At least that has been my experience. Of course, not all of them are like that.

The German Wikipedia aims to serve all German-speaking regions (including outside of Germany), which isn’t always easy, but it works pretty well. For example, there are special measures for Swiss German. Still, sometimes there are problems. For example, I remember a discussion on Wikipedia about the words “Kraut” and “Kohl”, which have slightly different meaning in different parts of German-speaking countries, and – just as you mentioned – it lead to a lengthy discussion about who is right and who is not. Thankfully things like that don’t happen often, and it certainly doesn’t justify splitting the whole of Wikipedia up. That would do more harm than good.

Actually, all of that should be much less of a problem for a technical forum. After all, people come together there in order to discuss technical issues, not linguistics.
 
Let me put it in some more open terms: a considerable parcel Brazilians and Portuguese people don't tolerate the another side unless there is absolutely no way around it (or in very superficial relations) - and the language differences is something both sides really tends to not compromise in favor of the another. This is not everyone but still far from being a minority in both sides.

If you create a "Portuguese" forums, that will be dominated by one of the groups because they got first or are in considerable more number, while the other side will completely ignore it and use any other forums unless there is absolutely no way around (when this is impossible to communicate in any other available language).

When both groups increase in size and since this is not a Brazilian or Portuguese owned forum (one can't impose its own language rules to the another), you will quite likely experience several clashes going on all the time because with greater number they start pursuing some kind of language dominance over the another.

There are very good reasons of why Brazilians and Portugueses are separated everywhere. Mixing them simply does not work in general, on-line or in person.

[EDIT]

The reasoning behind it is the (unreasonable) Portuguese people understand the Portuguese language belongs to them and they are not going to compromise it in favor of a former colony, where the people is quite open on how they actually don't give a flying fck to the Portuguese language, but just complain of beign forced into it.

On the other side, the (unreasonable) Brazilians are not willing to compromise in favor of the Portuguese because Portugal is a such "irrelevant" country with 10 million population who believe they are very important, and there is absolutely no excuse to make 220 million of Brazilians compromise in favor of such minority, in anyway.
 
Let me put it in some more open terms: a considerable parcel Brazilians and Portuguese people don't tolerate the another side […]
If it is really that bad, then that’s another good reason for not opening a Brazilian and/or Portugueses sub-forum here on forums.freebsd.org.
 
That's life, people take sides. Some pretend otherwise. I'll be happy to be a moderator on a PT/BR Portuguese forums. There's going to be no moderation.
 
I would assume the vast majority of FreeBSD users are open-minded enough to be able to overcome such differences in language dialects. I'm not aware there are any problems for e.g. german/austrian/swiss-german, never heard of such regarding russian/ukrainian (in defiance of severe political tensions!), british/american/australian/pidgin/creole/any other english, etc.
Extra localized forums are useful for those with limited english skills. Depending on the region, that makes up for a lot of people, who are right now excluded from accessing a lot of useful knowledge.
 
Careful there, Russian and Ukrainian aren't dialects of each other. As for the issues you haven't heard about, let's just say this is strongly correlated to your knowledge of specific languages.
 
You could create as many sub forums or even forums for each of the languages/dialects you want here, for FREE: https://www.proboards.com/ This https://forums.freebsd.org should remain in English. And I think if you send the admins of this forum an email about your forums and ask them to add it to a list of localized forums of FreeBSD so your forums could be more widely known, they would accept it without much trouble. Of course, you have to clearly define that your forums are your own, and this https://forums.freebsd.org and the admins here have nothing to do with your forums hence do not held any responsible for the content and the management of your forums, then I think you will be fine.
 
Careful there, Russian and Ukrainian aren't dialects of each other. As for the issues you haven't heard about, let's just say this is strongly correlated to your knowledge of specific languages.
Yes, you're right here. I looked that up in Wikipedia after your reply, seems that written Ukrainian is farther apart from Russian than e.g. written Swiss-German from German (which is academically seen as a dialect). Did not know that. So maybe the ~67% common vocabulary is not enough even for discussions on technical topics. On other languages, I have to rely on what I read & hear about in the media.
 
never heard of such regarding russian/ukrainian

I would advise to not ever try to get into that (Russia-Ukraine) but for starters, Ukraine never was been an independent country before 1991 (except for several months in 1917) and then, the Russian speaking population in Ukraine isn't really decoupled from Russia (and both countries are physically connected). In the same sense the Portuguese speaking countries in Africa still speak like the Portuguese since they separated in the 1970's (IIRC Angola 1975 but the others around the same time).

Brazil separated from Portugal in 1822, and there literally has an Ocean between both! Also, while Brazil was a Portuguese colony the large immigration in early XX century completely changed that population-wise. We have a state (Paraná) created of several Polish (and a few Ukranian) colonies, others states are basically German (with a bit of Italian). The single largest Japanese diaspora in any city is in São Paulo, and go on.

Also, Brazilian-Portuguese and European-Portuguese can 't really be called dialects of each other since both are officially formalized (autonomously) in each country.
 
Ahem, I'm pretty sure Russian/Ukrainian language split wasn't 30 years ago. Also, this not a contest.

I was not referring to the Ukrainian language but specifically to the Russian spoken by the Russian speaking population (IIRC about 29%) in Ukraine.

The Ukrainian language basically is a polonized Russian (or an artificial engineered language), and that should come from about 200 years ago when Prussia actively started trying to decouple Ukraine from the Russian Empire (a process that never ended).
 
IMHO this thread should be marked solved. Most of us seem to agree that we'll not have localized sub-forums here and it's possible to create & manage such forums outside FreeBSD.org. There are some already, e.g. bsdforen.de (in german -- austrian, swiss, brazilian, yiddish, namibian, pennsylvanian etc. users are welcome ;)).
 
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I know it's counter narrative to media propaganda (esp. English-language ones) and I realise that it's mostly a 'Northern America'/'western Europe' phenomenon, but believe it or not, there are different nation/tradition in this planet, and it will be. Language is just one the elements of a civilised society, but it's not everything. You brought Russia. Russia is a thousand (way more) years complex society with historically layered traditions. I was watching a short clip from a lame show on HBO. There was a midget circus clown with big head, barking Russia, Russia, Russia. If that's the show, most of the people get their news and information from it, then Doomsday is real and it's coming.
 
That's a good reason to learn english & join a forum like this one, where we keep contact to people from all over the world :) We have the off-topic section, profile posts & personal conversations for casual chit-chat. Much better than TV!
 
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The Ukrainian language basically is a polonized Russian (or an artificial engineered language),

Well, not quite. Naturally, European languages are heavily influenced by European politics; e.g. Romance languages wouldn't exist without ancient Romans and their conquests. Are they artificial too? Is that even a useful designation?

and that should come from about 200 years ago when Prussia actively started trying to decouple Ukraine from the Russian Empire (a process that never ended).

That's a peculiar way of spelling XVI century and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth :-/
 
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