German Subforum
 

Hi @ all,

I really would like to know from you whether it is possible to make a german subforum...
I'm already taking with the users in the n800.de forum about making a new forum because the n800.de-Forum is even not up-to-date and the admin's last login was i think one year ago.

Thanks for your Attention!

Sincerely yours
------------------------------------
Thread on n800.de:
German | English (by GoogleTranslate)

Re: German Subforum
 

I'm in favor of everything that moves the whole Maemo universe away from its current English-only status and adds some user-friendliness by making people able to at least read what we've got.

OTOH, there already is a German thread here, but it isn't too active at the moment. Maybe it's the old chicken-egg-problem. Maybe N800.de is still too popular. Maybe to attract people who don't speak english, you need a site that's completely in their respective languages, not only a sub-forum. I don't know.

The only thing I do know is that those fellow tablet-owners I know here in Austria don't have access to the most basic information (how to encode videos for the tablets, how to install software, how and why to update your OS) because they don't find it in German. It must be very frustrating to own a tablet and not know about all these basic things.

Re: German Subforum
 

Yeah, when moving to talk.maemo.org there could be translations for the wiki and multilingual forums.

Re: German Subforum
 

That's what I wanted to improve! I don't know whether you have read the thread on n800.de or not, but all the users there see the same problems in the forum as you explained!

I really don't think so. If you are lucky there are 2 or even 3 users online one hour on weekends!

As you can see in the n800.de'S thread I would really like to publish my Maemo-SDK-VMx.alternative called "UbuntuEntwicklerEdition" (UbuntuDevelopterEdition), which is mainly in german and which will be published with detailed howto'S.
The Fact is, that developting applications for the iT and even for your PC isn't "really" difficult!

So I can only see a problem in the knowledge of english-language or the users are scared to break thier iT, because they could get something false, so they want thier first language in forums/howtos and even SDK's!

greeeez

Re: German Subforum
 

I really hope so ;D It would solve the problem on the n800.de'S thread!

Re: German Subforum
 

There has been one request by a Spanish user for a Spanish sub-forum too. I agree with the principle: users who prefer to speak their own language should have an easy way to find other users who prefer to speak their own language.

Lets learn how other platform deal with this issue.

The name n800 seems specific to N800.

Maybe one of the German resellers would be interested in creating a forum, it would be some kind of advertisement for their products.

Re: German Subforum
 

As I told the guys looking for a Russia section on the wiki, you'll need some basic level of commitment from people willing to clean it up when the spam hits.

If it's something you want to move forward with, start by putting together a proposal and we can move from there.

Re: German Subforum
 

I would like to help out at the german subforum as a mod or something like that (removing spam, take care of netiquette and so on). But I´m working 8 hours a day at RL, too. So no forum fulltime-job...

Good idea btw.

Re: German Subforum
 

I'm happy to help on a German or French forum section (and even the English one ;) ), I could probably even understand enough Spanish to recognise spam there too :)

Re: German Subforum
 

same request for an italian subforum...

thanks

Re: German Subforum
 

so to the forum-admins, what are your conditions for a german-subforum?

- by now we would have more than 2 mods ( zehjotkah and me) and other users would help us to detect spam..

@ benny1967

I really don't think so :rolleyes: the most users in the n800.de-forum just want to leave the forum because the admin is tooooo inactive as I described in my first post!

Re: German Subforum
 

Usually, I leave a forum/chat room/... when the admin is too active. :p
What would you need an admin for if you have content and vibrant discussions? ;)

Re: German Subforum
 

we're afraid, that the site will be deleted in the near future, because the admin deosn't log on for almost a year...

Re: German Subforum
 

:D But you actually now what I mean, right?
So I even don'T see an problem actually with getting mod'S
because there are lot's of users, who want to help to get a german-subforum ...
-or not!?^^

Re: German Subforum
 

and don't forget that there is (thats my oppinion) a stange structure in the forum and I don't think that he will ever add the coming N900 on the site!
I noticed that lots of people sell their n8x0 on the page because they are sad of being not up-to-dated and thats almost, as already discussed, the main basics!

Re: German Subforum
 

Like I said before, put together a proposal and we can move from there.

Re: German Subforum
 

I really don't want to ask to much stupid questions but..
was has the iTT-forum to do with the maemo.org-site?

Re: German Subforum
 

Re: German Subforum
 

You do it ... iTT is moving to talk.maemo.org ... read the news :)

Re: German Subforum
 

Perhaps people don't appreciate how much of a logistical nightmare this would be - tutorials would be made in German/French/Spanish/Italian/Russian and no one from any other language would be able to benefit from these people's advice without first having it translated. Unfortunately, the way most countries education systems are setup to teach English to everyone as a second language makes English the closest thing we have to a universal language - I have no doubt that this will eventually change.

Personally I don't think the community is large enough to warrant different language sub-forums. I feel like the itT community is dominated by less than 100 people at the moment and if you start splitting advice between languages you're going to have a knowledge management meltdown - something itT is already dangerously close to with such poor search functionality

Re: German Subforum
 

Hmm, have pity on those who don't speak English well, why not have foreign language forums.

I say go for it, thopiekar do you have a maemo.org login so you can add this as a task?

Re: German Subforum
 

do they want my pity? hehe

one more point - people that speak European languages seem to have quite a good grasp of English - it seems to be the stray Vietnamese or Cambodians coming through here that have trouble with English

Don't get me wrong - i'd like itT to have a global following with forums in every language - the problem is, the community isn't large enough to achieve an equal spread of knowledge across all languages

Re: German Subforum
 

No certainly not large enough to support all languages, but we might as well try to support some of those where the Nokia devices can be bought.

I'd guess the majority of HowTos, etc., will continue to be written in English (even if the writer is foreign, more exposure writing in English), with the non-English forums being used for those not confident enough at English/wanting confirmation that their understanding is correct.

Re: German Subforum
 

Well, at least in Germany, English is not always taught as second language in school and I know many people who can't read or speak English very well because they learnt it too late and don't have it around every day.

I'd suggest that people should be advised to use the English forum here unless English is a problem.
That way the people who don't speak English well have a place where they can ask questions, but the subforums wouldn't get too crowded which makes them easier to maintain and helps avoiding fragmentation.

Re: German Subforum
 

At the moment, probably yes. As I pointed out earlier, there already was an attempt to establish at least a German thread here, and it more or less failed.

I also share your concerns about what you call a "knowledge management meltdown", given the relatively small size of the community ATM. (As an example, from what I read in his profile, fanoush is from the Czech Republic. I very much doubt it would have been a good thing had he found a Czech subforum here from the very start and only participated there...)

On the other hand the current situation (and again, I'm not referring to ITT only, but to the whole information infrastructure we have, from the Wiki to the maemo.org static pages to the package descriptions in extras to this forum...) scares away people who don't feel comfortable enough with English or don't understand it at all. I'm convinced this makes for a bad user experience. (Just imagine you never have access to all the information offered here and in the Wiki etc.!)

Personally, I think information exchange at a higher level (=less participants worldwide, people who are used to English because it's used in other areas as well) should remain in English only because it helps to bring people together. This would certainly include everything that's currently accessible via maemo.org.

Language-specific subforums here may be an experiment if they can be done without much effort, but I still doubt they'd easily reach the audience they should be intended for: after all, you'd need to navigate through an English site before you reach the sub-forum, an even if we overcome this, it might simply be not attractive enough in terms of content at first. (chicken/egg)

The ideal solution should be a low-level site (a little like tablet school) that's attractive to those who never had access to the information we take for granted meanwhile because we follow the existing resources for years.
Static content, maybe a wiki, most of it probably directly taken and translated from existing English sources. This site would then have a forum of its own (or link to a language-subforum here, whatever), so that people have something to talk about (like "I tried cloning to SD yesterday, but I don't see my video files any more now").

There should also be a way to add language-specific descriptions to packages that show up in the application manager. If this can't be done (and is not "fixed in Fremantle"), the language specific site could as well provide a list of applications automatically taken from extras and translate the package desciptions so people can read them online. Better than nothing.

The goal of all this would be to give people access to everything the NIT can do that's not described in the Nokia manual, enhancing the user experience, helping to make the devices and the platform popular.
The downside: Right now, because we lack such resources, people who would need them might probably already have sold their tablets again. We'd invest a lot of work to create these sites, maintain them, and I bet it'll be more than a year until there's enough users who visit them.

Also, I don't know what Nokia is up to with maemo.nokia.com... Will there be a maemo.nokia.{de|fr|es|..}? Will it be the "come here and discover what else your device can do"-thing for all supported languages? Or will it be English only again?

Re: German Subforum
 

That is, and has practically always been, possible. Most people just don't do it.

Feel free to jump in and start submitting translation patches to maintainers, though.

Also, this will probably interest you: https://wiki.maemo.org/Objective:Community_localization

Re: German Subforum
 

There is a potential problem with localisation though: legal responsibility. The site owner is not able to comprehend all these languages. To work around this the group of people who speak a certain language have to be, at a whole, mature and bear the responsibility to translate something to English at the request of the site owner.

Re: German Subforum
 

I feel reasonably mature ;)

Re: German Subforum
 

I'd have assumed that the owner of a site like "treffpunkt-maemo.de" or whatever would be a native German speaker. And that there'd be a different, independent site in Spanish etc., and that none of these would formally depend on the current admins/sites.

(After all: It's us German speaking users who want to have it, why should somebody else do the work for us ;) ?)

Re: German Subforum
 

I think a german subform on talk.maemo.org would be great. Localization works for a lot of sites...why not here? I don't believe that it will be a problem to find mods.
Using another site than the official maemo page is suboptimal. Having everything useful on a single domain is a huge pro imho.

Altough my technical knowledge about the N800 is...lets say improvable, I have some basic knowledge and could help fighting spam and other garbage in the forum. Actually my english is a bit rusty and not as fluently as it was years ago but I could also do some translation.

Re: German Subforum
 

The remark was hypothetic and not meant as insult to German speaking people. Its a general remark which also counts for other languages. Its not only related to social maturity, its also related to law (e.g. DMCA.) It is something the founders and those who are legally responsible must keep in mind.

Each solution has their pros and cons. Both a local subforum and an independent forum is also possible, or just letting either one arise based on supply and demand. Ubuntu has native forums under the Ubuntuforums flag, but also independent domains with their own community.

Re: German Subforum
 

Hello,
I am very interested in a German maemo/n900 forum.
Not everyone can understand English so well.
Therefore, a German subforum is a good idea.

This post has been translated with google translate :D

Re: German Subforum
 

That would be really cool, I dont want to write in english all the time...

Re: German Subforum
 

Yes,and
The whole maemo.org in other languages would be great.
Includes descriptions of the apps.