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Protose and Bilingualism

Protose | October 07, 2004 | 12 comments

I got an email today from someone asking me why Protose.org was not bilingual. Initially I was just going to reply to that one person but I would like to take the time to answer the question on here and hopefully get everyone’s feedback and more specifically feedback from the French members of the software engineering community.

So why isn’t Protose bilingual, we are based out of Canada which has two official languages. More specifically we are based out of Quebec which is considered the French speaking province of Canada, so we should have no excuse. But then again we are not looking for excuses. I am personally very proud of being born and raised in Quebec, though ashamed of the quality of my french, and would love to have Protose be bilingual. So what is my excuse then? oh yeah, I can’t write in French. And when I say I can’t write I really can’t write.

Do I want Protose to be bilingual? I wanted it to be bilingual from the start but the problem is that I just was not sure what bilingual meant in this context. Did it mean having every post translated in both official languages? Because if so there was no way I would be able to start Protose because I am not capable of translating all the articles myself. We would still be on the first article… and I am not over exaggerating.

I wasn’t sure what we should do so I gave my good friend Frederic Rioux, who was the driving force behind making CUSEC a bilingual conference, a call. If anyone could help me determine what to do it was him, I have never meet a more proud and fair French Canadian (I think he would prefer Quebecer though… but I am not sure) in my life. He would only suggest what was fair.

We came up with the following options:

Option #1: Make Website Totally Bilingual
Make the website bilingual as well as have an army of translators, both English and French, translate all posts that have been submitted.

Option #2: Have Posts in Either Language
Offer the website in both languages but when it comes to the articles allow people to submit articles in either language. Have a filter at the top of the main page and category page that will allow the user to either display: All Articles, English Only or French Only.

The first option is the best in theory. But in a perfect world I have two concerns:

1. Will the effort being used to translate articles be better served writing new ones for both the French and English members of the community?
2. Will the delay between the time it takes for someone to translate a post make people just read the post in it’s original language?

To be very honest I am afraid of the first option. But if that is what everyone wants then I will find a way to have it implemented.

To be very honest both Fred and I really liked the second option… come to think of it he did not like the first one either. We could make the website bilingual i.e. menu names, categories, etc. When it comes to articles we can accept them in either language and if anyone wants to see articles in a specific language they can filter the articles to only see them in their language of choice. If someone feels that a specific article should be translated they could translate it for Protose.

How does everyone else feel about this? What option do you like best or do you have another option you think we should consider? How important is having Protose bilingual to you?

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Comments

October 7, 2004 07:27 AM | Louis-Philippe Huberdeau commented:

Working for a bilingual conference myself, I know how hard it is to translate an entire website and all of it’s content. Since the content is updated daily, it also means translation is a daily job. I would rather see the team working on more original content than translating it all. It would probably kill the website on the long run since posting would be twice the job.

Even if the articles on Protose are being translated, the articles it refers to won’t be.

If might be possible to just propose visitors to translate articles once in a while. As the community grows, you will see if visitors think it’s important or not.

This was a french speaker opinion.

October 7, 2004 09:19 AM | Fred2 commented:

As a french Quebecer ( ;-) ) also, I still prefer the whole website in english.. I prefer having more content than having translations. But that’s just me! I agree that the best thing would be to have the whole website translated; but the extra work it implies just seem too much..

October 7, 2004 10:07 AM | mcs commented:

Speaking of community growth, has there been any tracking of its size? As much as I hate mass mailers, maybe there should be an option to create login accounts for comments. Just a name and e-mail, and occasionaly an e-mail can go out saying “Have you looked at Protose lately, here’s what the recent article have been” or something.

October 7, 2004 10:49 AM | Vincent de GrandprÈ commented:

In fact, when I wrote the message original to Jonathan, I just confirmed that even there is two offical languages in Canada, french still won’t appear in most discussion and documents. It’s ok, I don’t have anything about a unilingual website, I do my sites in french only!

In fact I was a bit sarcastic writing my original message. What I am trying to tell is that there is still one official language in Canada, wathever the law says.

In my point of view, there is then a slight difference between Engineers form QuÈbec and from Canada. Because QuÈbÈcois engineers must know english to communicate with canadians engineers. And so, engineers form QuÈbec can also communicate with no problem with engineers from the french communitity around the world.

So, an engineer from QuÈbec that don’t understand english well, will be more disavantaged than the one who knows english language, for example, he won’t be able to read Protose.org efficiently!

What I’m suggesting :

• Liberate QuÈbec from Canada and buit our own software engineering website.
• Liberate QuÈbec from Canada but don’t give a penny about a website.
• Have a working translation of Protose.org for those that have troubles with english language.

Note : I have an issue for you :

• What will happen in the sotware engineering world when QuÈbec will be a coutry? (I mean, who will change all those drop-down over the web, goddamnit?)

October 7, 2004 03:22 PM | Fred commented:

Come on! Let’s put politics aside. Engineering should be decoupled from politics.

The reason for Protose to be bilingual is to make it easier for engineers challenged in one language or another to access Protose’s content.

I think a bilingual interface and some filtering options are nice tools to have.

October 7, 2004 06:04 PM | Mark Pavlidis commented:

I agree with Fred. It is not a political issue, it is more of a social one. To accelerate the success of Protose, opening it to a wider community can only be a good thing.

October 7, 2004 07:10 PM | John Kopanas commented:

mcs, we are going to offer a monthly newsletter shortly to visitors of Protose where we will send and executive summary of what has been happening over the last month as well as a list of the most popular articles. We hope to do it shortly.

October 7, 2004 07:15 PM | John Kopanas commented:

I never meant to make the language issue a political issue. I really do though appreciate everyone’s feedback. You guys are responsible for defining Protose and will dictate where it will be a year from now!

October 7, 2004 09:42 PM | Ness commented:

Googles language tools http://www.google.ca/language_tools?hl=en

October 8, 2004 10:17 AM | mcs commented:

Web translators are sketchy at best. You remember Baber’s classes Ness? The whole talk about “We have no bananas” and “no bananas are have”(or some thing like that).

October 8, 2004 01:13 PM | Ness commented:

Yeah, that’s what makes it fun. There is always some messed up phrases. That’s the funny quirk of online translations, BUT it will help you to figure out what is being said.

October 10, 2004 06:52 PM | ymazal commented:

I suggest wehave a bilingual site, for everithing except the articles (all the menus, the descriptions…).

For the articles : when a user enters an article, he could traduce it himselfe or put it in onely one of the official languages. When a user reads an article, or a breaf description of it, he could see it in the languge of it’s choice… the articles that where traduced automotacaly should be LABELED, so the reader could choose to read the article in its original language…

you can see that my English is not verry good so you know I’m more french lol. I have a technical college degree and I study in softwre in a Quebec university…

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