[Feedback]Different languages under the same forum roof.

Pryotra·2/24/2014, 1:47:58 AM·7 votes·655 views

With the indoctrination of EU servers, some may have noticed that there are other languages on the planet besides English. While some, like myself, might understand them, they simply won't get a fair shake when it comes to GD here. Rioters aren't going to really respond to possibly important issues if they don't understand, say, german, while English speakers that respond may not be understood by the poster of another language.

To help out our friends who only understand their native language, could you possibly use an auto translator like google translate for these posts? While I understand they are less than perfect, they are better than having them completely ignored. If you really fear misrepresentation, you could always have a footnote added saying "Translated to English from X. See original text?" with a link to the original post in its native language. This could go both ways as well, so that English posts could be translated over to whatever language a particular poster is familiar with.

Editing this in, to elaborate:

I agree that an auto translator is a poor choice, but like the poster before you, I don't want this to be an "English or GTFO" scenario. I would prefer that there was only 1 language on the planet so this wouldn't even be an issue, but of course we live in a world of plurals.

While I understand some other languages, not everyone else does. I don't want to exclude someone because they do not know a language. I figure that people can still have good ideas, even if they don't know my language.

If you have another solution, like Language mutations, I am more than willing to hear it. I did a quick google search, but didn't really come across anything. I should probably edit this into the OP...

###Proposed Solutions:

MXXIV proposed Language mutations:

Now with mutations, I meant "French board", "Spanish board", "Poland board" and so on. These languages are really common in the world of League of Legends. There might of course be boards for all languages - if the system is modular enough, it shoudn't matter. Just the general idea is splitting by language, not region. Just think about Switzerland - not a big country, yet there are 2 main languages slowly fading into each other. Or Canada: they speak French too! But they belong in North America, while France in Europe.

I can see this in many software help forums, where some non-english languages are present. A can imagine user being able to set languages he can understand and reply to. That would be really cool and advanced for people that speak 2 or more languages.

I personally think this would work well on sub communities like Help and Support, eSports, or other sub communities that might be better off being region specific. I would hesitate to do this to the whole forum, as now we are kinda defeating the purpose of the merge, and I don't want to exclude people based on whether or not they know English, which is the primary language for most Rioters.

18 Comments

Sneak Dog2/24/2014, 10:54:06 AM3 votes

I don't think this is feasible. Have you tried translating things recently? Meanings often get bent entirely and as the post gets larger, it also gets more and more unreadible, not to mention spelling mistakes.

MackleDoge2/24/2014, 2:03:14 AM2 votes

I think this is a pretty important issue if Riot every wants to have a true "community" forum. Issues like this are always significant in high population and internationally popular games and I've yet to see a truly effective means of handling the situation. I think employing an on-site translator could at least assist in the matter, with the forum users having the ability to identify in their profile settings their original/preferred/native language. This would allow the forum system to automatically translate from a posted language that is not the language specified by that user's settings into the language that the user selects as their preference. Obviously just using an automatic translator isn't going to be perfect like you mentioned, but I think it might be a good temporary solution until Riot can come up with something more permanent or effective.

MXXIV2/24/2014, 7:22:36 PM1 votes

Auto translate wouldn't help. However splitting the community in 3 or more separate board is just plain retarded. Myself, I come from the Czech Republic. But soon, I realised that most of the posting happens here, on the North America servers. So I use North America board.

Splitting the community means splitting the interaction potential. The fact that some don't speak English is honestly, in this modern age, a little bit their fault.
We computer gamers should learn English from games.