How about we create an international section on the forums where people can speak their native languages?
You know we need Japanese, Spanish, German, Italian, and few others...
Broaden our audience you know.

At least give them a bare minimum of one-to-two forums per language... it'll give them a place to find others like themselves and converse.

i dont think theres enough ppl in here with different languages to begin with

I've actually been thinking of doing this for many months, and even have spoken to at least a few people about it, but never went through with it since it would be tough to mod these sections.

For all I know, people could be talking about sketchy things in those sections. Staff would have to rely on a translator to mod them.

I may go through with this, but I'm not sure how well things would go.

i dont think its a bad idea but i also dont think it will be worth the efford

I'd say wait a bit, there's not enough. It'd end up with 3, maybe 4 people per forum, if that. And then about 20 people in the Japanese section who aren't even native speakers That's not worth it.

I think it would divide the community, unless EVERY post had a translation underneath.

We could create them as we gain the ability to staff them.

We should eventually have enough multilingual members to make it possible.

Yes, that's the first thing that came to my mind when I saw this, but I was waiting for more input. I think whether we would have enough people, will depend on what language it is. I don't think ones like Spanish or Japanese would be too bad. Lots of English speakers also speak those. Plus, you have to consider that if you open those boards, I am pretty sure you will quickly get enough members. Some of those people may even be from here(as I know several of you are bilingual), or people who wanted to join here but were put off by the seemingly "English-only" atmosphere of it. The problem will be, finding ones that speak English. Almost seems like we'd have to recruit/ask people from other forums, or here, etc, which makes me like ivory's suggestion of "create them as we gain the ability to staff them". That sounds logical to me. So in order to find our spread, I think the best thing to do would be to start some sort of language poll, and figure out who all speaks what. Then we can start identifying potential mods and seeing what boards are feasible and which one are not at this time. Just my thoughts...

Any new thoughts about this?

It would be likely to not be all that active compared to the main board, if what I see on other forums hold true here as well.

If such a forum will be made, do we really need to divide it into different languages? On WP all non-English languages are in the same section, allowing anyone to post in whatever language they like.
The disadvantage is that it's a little messy, but everyone recognise their own language so it's a minor problem.
The advantage is that no language group is ignored. Whatever languages we can't mod, I doubt they're gonna be a problem, and if I'm wrong we can always change it as we see the need.

Norwegian, Danish and Swedish are so alike that they won't pose a problem. Both Dreaming and I should be able to deal with them. Didn't I see somewhere that Rezu knows Spanish? (Sorry if I'm wrong.) Mikan can deal with German. Considering how many here have a thing for Japanese, we might need someone who could help out with Japanese. If we can fix that, and preferably French as well, we'd have a lot covered.

This board is way too small for this kind of thing IMO. I'd only consider implementing something like this if this forum had maybe 50,000 users or so. Only then would we have large enough minorities for this to actually work.

I've seen boards for minorities on forums with even 10,000+ users and the non-English boards were pretty much always dead. I would, however, love something like this on the board, but it simply won't work.

I'm the only italian.

I looked at WP for the first time to check their section. Nice place.
But I agree with Chair, it's still too early. Even the number of active users from non-english speaking countries is quite low. I could still count them by finger.

But I wouldn't mind a normal topic where everyone can talk in whatever language.

I like that idea.
Would that be okay?