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I sent Tom the following PM: Quote:Tom, I’m not comfortable with foreign language posts that not everyone can understand. I don’t mind at all the thought and intent behind your post and posting it in a language other than English, but the admins and moderators need to be able to know what is being said in all threads here – and that can’t happen if we don’t understand the language in which the post and thread comments are written.
I’m going to add a note to your post for now, requesting that any comtributions in another language include a translation for those who don’t speak the language – and I’ll open a discussion behind the scenes with the other admins to get their feedback.
What are your thoughts? Can we allow posts and comments to be written in a language other than English? We would have to trust the translations provided – and I’m not comfortable with that.
I’m living in the land of bad translations, and that one was pretty bad! I tend to agree that it’s difficult to conduct in multiple languages, but I might be comfortable if we wanted to take a crack at Spanish since I can cover that. What other languages do we have among the admins? My French would be limited, but perhaps passable.
My Mandarin is still limited to “I have horse mouth. Does your maternal grandmother want hamburger?”
Tom speaks Spanish, so if Angie does also . . . I wouldn’t want to make it a regular thing, but we might ask in a separate post for lurkers and participants to let us know privately how many of them speak Spanish as their native language and would like to have posts in Spanish occasionally.
I just think it might be a good idea in theory that won’t have enough of an audience to make it worth it – but I don’t have any concrete knowledge about it.
I only speak English, but I can do a pretty well with a New England or Southern accent! (My Chicago and Canada accents are pretty poor.) 
My languages: German, Korean and a very small amount of Spanish I love languages … but I don’t think we can really support or moderate much beyond English.
Anyway, I vote for only allowing limited use of other languages on the board — like a phrase here or there to make some point. We can’t moderate long conversations or multi-paragraph posts in other languages effectively. Board members can communicate with each other privately in whatever language they wish. I don’t really see the purpose though of a public conversation that only a few can participate in. We’re producing content for a English speaking target audience.
FWIW, I’ve wondered more than once about the same problems we deal with on our site existing among Spanish speaking members. I would think there would be a similar proportion of members with the same issues. There are probably more Spanish speaking Mormons at this point than English speakers. I would assume there’s an roughly equal number of disaffected Spanish speaking members.
hawkgrrrl wrote:My Mandarin is still limited to “I have horse mouth. Does your maternal grandmother want hamburger?”
ROFL!!
😆 :clap: I speak American english, a little southern/midwestern variety and on a good day I can get by with Utahn.
sorry, no foreign language support from me. I wouldn’t be surprised if people speaking other languages have need of support within mormonism. I just don’t know that we can be all things for all people, so I think we keep it English. I don’t have a problem if you all that know other languages wish to moderate posts here and there in those languages…but it seemed almost like Tom was marketing it out to people searching the Internet in Spanish. I would be concerned trying to create communities for a whole bunch of other languages. It seems it would spread us pretty thin in supporting that, and our articles and website resources are all in English.
If others wanted to start their own StayLDS.com forums in their language and coordinate or share learnings or best practices with us, that would be good…but don’t we have enough involvement in English to keep us busy?
Just my thoughts. I just can’t be of much help. I wish I spoke other languages…but never learned.
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