TGTAP has lost its old spirits !

[JustADummy]

Well here are the top 25 countries based on visitors from the last 30 days:

It appears as though we should start with Portuguese, Romanian, German, Dutch or Polish - the five most common countries in question that uses the Alphabet we use and the majority of the countries that don't speak English.

I agree. Well, still maybe there are more Portuguese (for example) members than Brazillian for example. The translated forums would increase activity on these countries. (Sorry if I sound confusing, today's not my day to explain stuff.)

@ Chris: What's up with 'Portuga'?

@ Highwire: That'd require someone to translate the whole forum or download some translations. Translating every single php entry on the forums is a time hogger.

Edited November 29, 2009 by Spider-Vice

[Thomas.]

That language thing is a good idea. Maybe we could have a thing (Like a drop-down box)to select which language they can view the forum in. Like we could put 5 or 6 popular languages and when someone comes online they can view the forum in their language. Also when the person has their language on and is viewing the forum they could make a topic in their language and if we have it on English we could still see it. Is that possible?

I think the best idea is to create forums that are language specific. So that we don't need to spend a lot of time on translating the whole site. What I presume is that there will be a General Discussion and GTA Forum for that particular language. The forum name would be, most likely, the name of the language in that language like "Deutsch", "Français", "Português" or "España", or alternatively it could say that it is the forum of that particular language "Le Forum de 'The GTA Place' en Français", "Le Forum de Français" or "Le Forum de Français sur The GTA Place".

These forums will most likely function the same as the English one but with specific Forum Bosses keeping an eye on discussion there as some members of staff may not know the language that is going to be used.

[MrLlamaLlama]

I think we could use a system similar to the forum bosses for this, but toned down even more. Basically, the bilingual members would have small tags to show it, and would be the first port of call to answer when something is posted in a foreign language. Even use one / two of them as the forum bosses. Obv. if they didn't know, they could just post a translation / PM someone who is likely to know the answer.

We could ensure all these questions, etc are in the right place with something on the homepage, similar to the LFM / FB / twitter thing thee atm, to notify foreign users that we can help, and where to post to get it asap.

[Chris]

That language thing is a good idea. Maybe we could have a thing (Like a drop-down box)to select which language they can view the forum in. Like we could put 5 or 6 popular languages and when someone comes online they can view the forum in their language. Also when the person has their language on and is viewing the forum they could make a topic in their language and if we have it on English we could still see it. Is that possible?

We can but that only applies to default text stuff. i.e. "New Topic" "Post Reply" and things like that are only what's translated. There's no way to make it translate actual topics and posts.

@ Chris: What's up with 'Portuga'?

Ha. Yeah I was using FireShot extension to capture and crop part of the webpage. It fails at rendering flash graphics for proper capture and cuts off the end of text. You can also see this with "United Kingdon"

I think the best idea is to create forums that are language specific. So that we don't need to spend a lot of time on translating the whole site. What I presume is that there will be a General Discussion and GTA Forum for that particular language. The forum name would be, most likely, the name of the language in that language like "Deutsch", "Français", "Português" or "España", or alternatively it could say that it is the forum of that particular language "Le Forum de 'The GTA Place' en Français", "Le Forum de Français" or "Le Forum de Français sur The GTA Place".

These forums will most likely function the same as the English one but with specific Forum Bosses keeping an eye on discussion there as some members of staff may not know the language that is going to be used.

Yes this is a great idea, but at the moment we have nowhere near enough members to warrant a whole sub-forum for each language. This is why I suggested, to start off with, simply have one forum for non-English topics. Any languages that we find are getting used a lot, only THEN will we create a dedicated sub-forum for them.

I think we could use a system similar to the forum bosses for this, but toned down even more. Basically, the bilingual members would have small tags to show it, and would be the first port of call to answer when something is posted in a foreign language. Even use one / two of them as the forum bosses. Obv. if they didn't know, they could just post a translation / PM someone who is likely to know the answer.

We could ensure all these questions, etc are in the right place with something on the homepage, similar to the LFM / FB / twitter thing thee atm, to notify foreign users that we can help, and where to post to get it asap.

Yeah. I suppose we could add an extra profile field for "Languages Spoken" - and make it so members CANNOT edit this themselves (this stops idiots adding loads of languages that they only know a couple of words in), instead, staff can edit it and only include languages we know they actually speak fluently.

Yeah I was thinking we I could put a page up on the main website explaining what we're doing. We'll have our members translate the page into their own language and include that too. Yes I can just use Google Translate, but I'd rather not rely on that because in some cases it's not going to get the message across accurately, and they'll either be confused or it simply won't make sense to them.

I'll put a link on the homepage to this page in the social network box we currently have to draw foreign users' attention to it. I think probably a lot of foreign members don't bother signing up here because they don't want to speak English all the time, either because they can't speak it well enough or would simply prefer talking to users in their own language.

[Gerard]

Whoah hang on. You're talking about automatic translations, a new staff level, a new reporting system. Let's bring it back down a notch.

Do we know how many people visit TGTAP wanting to get information in another language? Obviously if we had this provision it would increase, but is there a demand? Is the speak-in-your-own-language topic heavily used?

I agree, start with one 'TGTAP International' sub-forum, enforce [DE] ISO language codes at the start of each topic title. If this gets heavy use, split off some subforums. If we need to introduce official bilingual helpers, we can do that, but I would have thought they'd regularly visit the subforums anyway, and the ISO code search should make it easy.

[JustADummy]

These seem some good ideas actually, but the forums could focus on the most important stuff: GTA and maybe the Lifestyle forum...

If all this language thing happens, I'm sure your members will increase.

[Thomas.]

What we should also do is count how many unique members actually use it instead of counting the number of posts one topic gets because many posts in one topic could be made by 2 or 3 people instead of a fair amount of members. This would make it slightly more fair. Which languages will we start with?

[Chris]

I don't think we need to specify which languages. We'll let the members post what they want and see what happens from there.

[Thomas.]

Okay. When'll this, if it does, come into place?

[Ivan]

Well, I guess I could help out with the portuguese stuff if this ever goes through.