Dutch translators wanted

Thanks for your opinion on this. If you take a look at the Spanish site you can see that all recent news is always up to date. Translation from English to Spanish happens within minutes to atmost a couple of hours. This is what we want to realize for the Dutch version aswell. A Dutch website can only be useful when it's up to date. I'm glad to see that your grandfather can read and write English, but unfortunately not everyone can express himself the way he wants in English.

There are several reasons for adding a dutch section to our website. The most important one is that there were many MSX users in the Netherlands and - as we have been experiencing from the many e-mails we received throughout our existance - not every one is able to read, let alone write English. Since it's fairly simple to give them their daily dose of MSX news in Dutch now, why would we cut them out?

The key issue is that the main language on this website has been and will always be English. Our translation system is set up this way that only news posts in English can be translated to other languages. This way all the news will be on the English website. You want the news the first? Read english.

Same goes to the forums. If you want to reach as many people as possible, you'd be crazy not to post in the English forums. If you can't express yourself well enough (yet) why not ask your question in a Dutch or Spanish forum in stead of not asking your question (and getting no answers).

As the MRC team will see to it to motivate people as much as possible to discuss things on the English website I think we have a win-win situation. Because of the multiple languages the MRC will attract more visitors, discussing a few things in your mother tongue can be a good start to get to know the forums (and some people) and then move on to posting in the international forums as well. Keep in mind that the English forums contain many posts already, categorized in multiple discussion topics, while the Spanish (and future Dutch) forums only contain of a 'general discussion' category, placed below the English forums in the forum index.

In the past the admins have often tried to make changes and additions to the website to see how they worked out. If they turned out not to be succesful after a reasonable amount of time we would change or even remove the idea. Since the Spanish website is a clear success even after only two weeks it seems like a logical step to us to implement other languages as well, and Dutch is the next logical step to us. (Portuguese and Japanese would be ideal, too ). We think it's fair to at least give the Dutch website a try.

Going multilingual is the best way to get all people involved in the new things MSX already has or will have. There are still quite an amount of people not being able to understand English as well as most of us do. A real good way to reach those people as well is offering the news and other parts of the site in their native language.

I think a Spanish, future Dutch (and maybe later even Portugese, Japanese, Italian and/or German, to name a few languages of other well-known MSX-users or -groups) is a very good idea to reach the whole MSX-community. I think the biggest part of MRC will always be English anyway.

That's why I wrote 'non-international'

as in:
'local'
'specialized' (coders-meetings and such)

so, not something like tilbeurs..

Using the mod replies above, I can see that the way it will be implemented could be an advantage for people with problems reading/writing English.
Still, please take care that the multilangual system doesn't interfere with the interlangual news synchronity

(offtopic) about the confirmation of Tilburg 2004 - there is no date for the fair yet and I'm still waiting for the letter with explanation and registration forms Ad promised to send me within a week when I phoned him about 3 weeks ago. Call me sceptic, I just want to check some things out first.

to wolf: The spanish (and future dutch) site are directly linked to the english site, it's impossible to put news on the dutch site that isn't on the english site. We want all our visitors to see all news. Internationalisation instead of localization. Buth.. internationalisation with an interface, news and a small forum in your native language

Aren't people who only understand Dutch screwed anyway? I mean, most news articles are just a notification of something interesting having appeared on a website somewhere and most of those websites are written in either English, Japanese or Spanish. The same goes for the manuals of newly released software etc...

I can understand the need for a Dutch forum, since writing (semi correct) English is many times harder than just reading it. Having a Dutch forum would at least enable those people who have real problems writing English to communicate with other dutch MSX enthousiasts.

However, like I already said, if somebody doesn't understand English (well enough) then I'm afraid most news articles won't matter too much anyway, even if they would be translated, since following up on the contents of the articles would be impossible most of the time due to the English content they point to.

All IMHO of course.

Ballerena, in some cases you might be correct. Looking at our newsarchive however, shows that most of the time we also write in dept what´s on the page in question (this counts mostly for non-english pages) . In case of downloadable files we also point to the file. The links in the articles only point to the source of the information, we tell you about that information. Websites in languages other than your own still might be of interest because of downloadable files, images of products etc.etc.

maar natuurlijk rob (oeps sorry, duth.. see this site is already multilangual!)
ps. what's a "tyre" ??

Also, I have to agree with Argon in that I just can't imagine that there are so many native Dutch speakers who can't read English well enough to understand the articles.

Will a split up of the forum community occur? I think only time will be able to tell us whether people who can write both English and Dutch suddenly start to only respond to or start new threads in the Dutch forums. As long as the English forums keep a prominent place in non-English versions of the MRC I don't think such a thing is likely to happen though.

So, no real reasons against a Dutch MRC per se, but I really don't think the target audience is large enough and the translations helpful enough to convince me to volunteer; that's all. If other people think differently and volunteer then that's their business.

Wishing you the best of luck in getting this thing organised and off the ground,

Eli-Jean

Thanks Rikusu for your support. Indeed, we need people who want to help, not people who tell us why they won´t help us regarding the Dutch site. Those can apply for helping out with the English site ;-)

"not people who tell us why they won´t help us regarding the Dutch site"

Pardon me?! This is /exactly/ what you want (well, you'd rather have 20 people just volunteering of course . Anyway, if people tell you /why/ they won't help then at least you'll get a chance to get in some counter-arguments and try to convince them to /do/ volunteer. And although you didn't convince me, you may have convinced somebody else who was thinking along the same lines as me, but didn't feel inclined or was just too shy to post a reaction.

Well, I'm a spanish user, and I really dont´t see where's the problem in adding new languages to the MRC. All of the spanish people that have begun posting in spanish language knew of this portal just because they had already visited the english version as well. So even if their/my english is not completely accurate, I don't think we'll suddenly stop visiting the english version, we have just been doing that for a long time and there's no reason for stopping now.

One of the things that I have appreciated in the spanish forums is that many of the people who writes in it couldn't write in the english version because they don't have enough level of english, and they´re quite happy to do it now in their own language, so I think that spanish forums will be mainly used by new posters, and the old ones will keep visiting the english version as well as the spanish one.

ps. what's a "tyre" ??
british variant of 'tire'

Would there be any reason for you or I to post in the Dutch forum? I think not...
The fact is, there are a lot of people in holland that can't understand english well. Some of these people are PROMINENT MSX sceners, a vast majority are people that are not well connected with the popular MSX scene.
Especially for the last group, a dutch version of MRC would GREATLY improve their ability to join the MSX scene, or at least stay up to date about it.

We have to realise the MSX scene as you and I know it (fair visitors, IRC visitors, Mailinglist subscribers) is not the only one. IMO a dutch MRC is THE way to reach that 'hidden' scene composed of lonely non-english speaking MSX'ers.

I'm also afraid about creating forums in Dutch.

I've always defended the forums in Spanish because there's a lot of people in Spain that can't read/write correctly in English. As far as I know, Dutch is a language somewhat close to English (as Spanish is to Portuguese and Italian); probably that's the reason why English in The Netherlands is nearly a second language.

But having forums in Dutch could be a risky business for the MRC... Most visitors are from The Netherlands and most of them could begin to post messages in Dutch.

There's also another possibility: launch the MRC in Dutch without forums in Dutch.

Sincerely, I don't know what to say.

guyver said: "Would there be any reason for you or I to post in the Dutch forum? I think not..."

Well, this is the whole point not? If WE (mostly active posters) do not post in dutch at all, the non-dutch ppl will miss out all of the fun, right?

still, not sure about the whole idea. I've checked the spanish forum and felt left out... what are they talking about (mocking us??)

although most people I know, know English well enough to read it, writing in it decently is a whole different story. Those people won't post in the English forums anyways, so by adding a Dutch forum (or a forum in any other language), these people can start participating in the MSX-community.

I don't think a lot of people will stop posting messages in the English forum when they can also post in their own language, since if you want to be sure to get a lot of reactions, you should be posting the English forum anyways.

The latest forums posts in English are in the front page of the Spanish MRC (right-bottom): "Foros en inglés" ("Forums in English"). Quite visible I think...

The latest forums posts in English are in the front page of the Spanish MRC (right-bottom): "Foros en inglés" ("Forums in English"). Quite visible I think...

Sorry, but I don't find "At the bottom right after scrolling down two screens" very visible. It's probably all down to how each individual navigates a site, but I for one just open up MRC and the only reason for me to scroll down on the front page is when I can clearly see that all the news articles that are directly visible to me are new. In that case I scroll down a bit to see whether the articles below it are new too. In other words, I open up the MRC frontpage and if I don't see anything new there, without scrolling, then I'll assume there's nothing new (except when the first article covers my entire screen and I already know that article, then I'll scroll down a bit to see whether there's something new).

Call me a lazy bum if you will, but that's how I use this and many other sites.

And the "Forums in English" latest posts aren't in the bottom, they are in the upper part of the front page next to the news posts.

?????

The things we're discussing here haven't nothing to do with "elitism". Can you explain yourself a bit clearly? And please, don't insult anybody.

The reaction in which I said some of the people here are short-sighted elitist bastards was removed, but I'll explain..
It's elitist to say "everybody should just know english", just because you can.
It's elitist to say "The dutch-only people don't need an own forum, because we, the frequent posters, won't post there anyway", because not being able to speak english does not mean you can't have fun, or don't have anything important to say.

And the "Forums in English" latest posts aren't in the bottom, they are in the upper part of the front page

If I don't scroll they're even below the bottom of my screen. What I meant was that even to just get them at least visible at the bottom of my screen, I have to scroll.

next to the news posts.

Next to the, for me, old news posts...

IMHO and hopefully without hurting the MRC crew too much, it's a design flaw that I have to scroll all over the place (and visit subpages) just to find out whether there's anything interesting new for me to read...

I know the MRC crew are always hard at work trying to improve the site and I'm sure things will get (even) better over time. In the meantime however I'm afraid that the current layout could indeed lead to a split up of the community with all the different language versions.

Like Sander said though, if things with a Dutch MRC don't work out as they had hoped then they can always scrap it again.

Wow, what a huge amount of reactions. It's good to see so many people care about the future of the MRC. Lets be clear about one thing: it's not our intention to split up the community. It's our intention to attract new people to it. Also, we would not like to leave people who can't read English out of the latest news.

I am quite convinced that the introduction of a Dutch MSX Resource Center will only have positive effects. I also expect people who start posting in the forums in their native language might (and probably will) move on to the crowdier English forums in the end. It already happened with one or two users on the Spanish forums in the short timespan they were online.

The 'new posts since last visit' should work quite good, though.. especially if you're always logged in. I know about a bug or two in that script which I will fix in the near future. As for the lay-out of the right side blocks. We might shift those blocks a bit in the future.

The bottomline is: We are not creating the Dutch MSX Resource Center for the (indeed, large amount) of dutch visitors capable of reading and writing English (we also had many Spanish visitors before we introduced our website in Spanish), we want to offer the contents of our website in Dutch because many people simpy can't read opr write English. After a few months of uptime we will have a look on the effects of the introduction of this dutch website. If things go terribly wrong we might have to decide to make some changes or take a step back. But at least we have tried by then.

A few sidenotes. Have a look at this poll. Even while our contents are in English (so the target audience probably isn't voting) 15% of the voters say they'd appreciate the contents in Dutch.

Furthermore, the MSX news will -always- appear on the English site first. No exceptions. Our system doesn't even allow it ;). Same goes for all the contents, except for those of the multilingual forums.

One last thing: Many people say 'ok, people don't write English that well, but they can try in the forums.' I remember at least one thread in our forums where a dutch user was ridiculed for his 'lousy English'. This will certainly not help in people giving a try. With a Dutc MRC they could get to know a few people in the forums in their native language first, and if they're comfortable with the forums and the MRC atmosphere they might give the English forum a try.

Remember: sometimes a small joke is nice, but if people start making fun of those users who are doing the best they can, they will probably never try again. What I'm trying to say is.. We would like people to post on the English MRC forums as much as they can. To succeed in this, we could indeed make some changes to our frontpage and forum index layout, but most important (and bottom line of this entire discussion)... the current MRC regulars should keep in mind that not everyone is as good in English as you are.

My 2 cents. (boy, 2 cents sure is a lot of talk these days)

Jamaar, ik kan alleen maar Nederlands, waar gaat dit gesprek over? Ik begrijp alleen het woord 'Dutch'. Zucht, was er maar 'n Nederlandse MSX site zoals deze.

DDD

[offtopic]My 2 cents. (boy, 2 cents sure is a lot of talk these days)And people even want to remove the 2 cents [/offtopic]

when some japanese translators join the team...
many japanese msx users, but relatively few japanese can understand english well.

I nearly forgot: If the Japanese translator(s) are not native Japanese, the translations need to be proof-read and corrected by native Japanese as well.