Geo Ghost wrote: 18 Sep 2021 00:05
We are fortunate that google translate these days is pretty good in getting a legible and understandable translation across. It won't ever be perfect and we'll always have a slight language barrier or phraseology that doesn't translate well.
Hi Geo Ghost,
thanks for your very extensive and compassionate post.
I've quoted the one thing I'd like to comment on - sure, I could just add a Google Translate comment to my post and might do so in the future, but it's not something I feel enthusiastic about.
I am a native German speaker and I do believe I am also fairly good at speaking English (well, at least at reading and writing English - my accent is atrocious). I wholeheartedly agree with you that machine translation is a huge blessing. For example, I have made some contributions to Wikipedia based on Japanese sources, which would not at all have been accessible to me without machine translation.
On the other hand, I also know that machine translation sometimes completely misses the mark, resulting in complete gibberish or, even worse, in a clear and concise text which means the exact opposite of the original. So writing something in German, putting it into Google Translate and then metaphorically putting my signature underneath the translation result feels wrong to me, simply because I know that the machine translation is far worse than anything I could write myself.
On the other other hand, I just don't like repeating the same thing over and over again. I'd be happy to explain an idea in German and in English, if that idea was something that hadn't expressed before (and I'm not a genius whose every idea is so unique that all of mankind would kneel before me). But in the case of this thread, the problem faced by OP was a fairly common one, and I am certain it has been discussed in English before someone on this forum. I also provided a summary of our conversation a while ago. So writing the same thing twice feels like work to me.
The gist of this situation is that I read a post by someone struggling to explain their problem in English, so I thought "hey, I'm a native speaker of German, and I have an idea of what might be the problem, so I'll reply in German". I've been on this forum long enough to know that, while the main language on here is English, occasional discussions in other languages have happened (for example, in the CZTR threads) and have been tolerated, so my assumption was that such discussions were tolerated on here, especially when they were focused on helping a user experiencing problems. Personally, as a professional software developer, I have at least some experience in tech support and my firm belief is that in a tech support scenario, the first priority is to provide useful help to the user who is currently experiencing problems.
The two reasons why this entire conversation has been somewhat annoying to me are that a) I went in here trying to be helpful in a situation where most other users of this board would have a hard time providing decent help due to the language barrier, and have gotten nothing but grief for it, and b) that in the past, it seems that the forum's team seemed to generally be okay with the use of other languages than English if the situation warranted it. I can definitely understand the need of a forum moderator to be able to understand the things that are being said on here - but if I provided an English translation for my posts, you'd still only have my word on what those posts are actually saying. And I can understand that you want people to be able to find solutions for their problems with the forum search and / or Google, which doesn't work if the response is only in another language, but I have already written a post that explains the gist of what I've said, and there are resources on the same topic in English already, and as far as I know, Google will prioritse those resources over this thread anyway if someone uses an English search query.