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Old 05-08-2005, 12:08 PM   #3
A. J. Raffles
10 GOSUB Abandonia
20 GOTO 10

 
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Shella, Kenya
Posts: 2,570
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I can hardly imagine that over 80% of the world's population don't speak English at all.:blink: You mean less than 20% speak it as their first language, right?

Well, fair enough, it's a great idea to have multilingual forums, obviously, but there'll be an awful lot of work involved, and for some languages the whole thing may not be terribly efficient. For example, I highly doubt there's more than about half a dozen people from Iceland (active posters, I mean), so poor Puffin might end up soliloquising half of the time.
The other reason why I'm not entirely convinced of the multilingual forums idea is that it would divide people into language groups, and if it catches on, we could end up with several sub-communities instead of one, with the Romanians posting in the Romanian section, the Spanish-speakers posting in the Spanish section and so on. Even somebody as multilingual as Sebatianos would only understand what was going on in about half of the forums.
Thirdly, even if we were going to add only two forums per foreign language currently represented on the site (one for game discussions and one for general chit-chat), that would mean eighteen additional forums, so the Abandonia forums would be twice as big. Maybe I'm being a bit too negative here, but I've never seen such a huge forum that worked well.
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