Hi there, dreamwidthers. As a polyglot who currently interacts on livejournal in several languages, I'd like to ask a question about this piece Denise wrote in the summer:
http://lists.dwscoalition.org/pipermail/dw-discuss/2008-July/000327.html For those of you who don't want to click, this is a discussion about what dreamwidth's plans are about translating the site into other languages. Denise presents her reasoning for not wanting to do so, essentially revolving around the fact that the way livejournal does it doesn't work. All of which is a bit sad for people like me, but completely understandable. She concludes by saying "Rather than starting up translation efforts under the existing model, we think it's better to leave the site English-only until we can come up with a better plan." That's fine. But she then goes on to say: /I suspect the better plan is going to be to solve the distributed-installation problem and the make-the-code-easier-to-install-and-maintain problem, and then people will be able to start up "Russian Dreamwidth" or "German Dreamwidth" or "Spanish Dreamwidth" and work with Dreamwidth seamlessly./ Does this mean that each language community would have to be on a completely different site, much like livejournal and insanejournal are now? If that is the case, I have a big issue with that--most people on my friends list exist entirely in the English-speaking world on livejournal, but some of them exist primarily (or in one case, exclusively other than having me on their friends list) in the Dutch-speaking or German-speaking worlds. I would be very sad if they felt that they had to be on a different site from me because that's where all the other "language x" speakers were. I agree that there are big glaring issues with keeping the entire site in English for now, but I would encourage you to find an eventual solution to that problem that doesn't involve ghettoizing people by language community. (And if I as a multilingual-type-person can be part of that solution, I hope you'll let me know when the time comes.) -- Jae/[email protected]/www.jaegecko.com/therealjae.livejournal.com "If you must put me in a box, make sure it's a big box with lots of windows and a door to walk through and a nice high chimney" -- Dan Bern, "Jerusalem" _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
