I'm happy to see lots of feedback about which is the best solution to face the language issue. Please carefully read the text below and let us know your opion. To propose more solutions is a big plus.
Scenarios
- Group: http://groups.drupal.org/drupalcon-southamerica (what we discuss now)
- Event (what we are going to discuss in her own thread)
Scope
- 5 target countries: Chile, Brazil, Perú, Argentina, Colombia
- People abroad welcome: whole world
- 2 native languages: Spanish(A), Portuguese(B)
- 1 common language: English(C)
Proposed solutions
1. English only(current)
Pros:
- Let the "whole" world follow and contribute to the group.
Cons:
- Language strongly represents culture, but english not represents target countries and their cultures.
- If [reader] only knows A or B language, then [reader] will need to translate text to C language.
2. Native language + English translation(auto-translation optional)
Pros:
- Let the whole world follow and contribute to the group,
- help non-english speakers follow us, so they can contribute also.
Cons:
- Auto-translation doesn't works that well for non-technical text.
- If [reader] only knows C language but SOME texts came in A and B language, then [reader] will need to translate A and/or B to C language.
3. Your proposal here
Pros:
- [Pro1]
Cons:
- [Con1]
Blessings!
Comments
My 2 cents / Mis dos centavos
I know exactly how people feel when they come to this group and see posts in English. Its exactly the same way I felt when I first joined the group. Something doesn't feel quite right, and its understandable for people to feel alienated (I felt that way at first). Why would we plan a DrupalCon South America in English?
I think there is two very good reasons for using English that people have brough up, the first one being that other people from the Drupal community form all around the world will be able to follow our progress. The second one and the most important one, is that not everyone in Brazil speaks spanish and I think its very important for all of us to communicate clearly to be able to organize a good proposal. This is something that we really need to consider, one of the arguments against english is that it might discourage people to contribute to the group, I think this is perfectly valid argument that I share. We must also keep in mind that having Spanish and Portuguese might also be discouraging for people to contribute because people might not be able to follow each other's comments and having people translate each post/comment is not hugely practical if there is going to be a lot of participation on this group.
I think its very important to work closely toghether and I think that if we each use our native language (which of course I would love to because I feel I can convey my messages more clearly in my own language), it might hinder our progress and give us difficulties communicating with the Brazilian community, and its essential for all of us to participate to make Drupalcon SA a reality.
The recent European DrupalCon groups for Masstricht and <a href="http://groups.drupal.org/drupalcon-paris-2009>Paris are mostly in English so that might be something to consider too.
I do have an optional idea, to have the discussions in our native language and then have an English summary that changes as the discussion develops:
3. Native language + English summary
Pros:
- Let the whole world follow the progress.
- Members of the group will feel more comfortable posting.
- Encourage mroe people from South America to contribute
Cons:
- Possible communication problems with the Brazilian community.
- Hard to follow comments and posts on a language you don't
understand.
Although I'm a big advocate of people staying close to there roots and culture, I think its important for us to have clear communication. In fact its essential if we are going to plan such a big an important event so I am voting for keeping this group in English. It might discourage some people to contribute, but it will help us have clear communication between all the countries which is essential. One of Dries' main plans as Drupal's Association president is to help start a Drupalcon in South America or Asia, so we can expect a lot of help from them, I briefly spoke to him about DrupalCon in South American in Szeged and he was really excited about it, one of the things he told me is that we need to make sure that we need to give people enough time to prepare the trip, because its not as easy for people in the community to travel to South America as it is to go to Europe or the US, I think this is something we should definitely address in our proposal/s, but that's a whole other thread.
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Nicolas
http://nic.ipwa.net
http://drupal.org/user/130909
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Nicolas
Hi there! I think you´re
Hi there!
I think you´re quite right. Now that I think of it, it seems quite fine to use english.
And besides all stuff that Nicolás´ve said, if it´s in english, people from around the world will come. That´s it.
The good thing of traveling here, it´s that´s fairly cheaper than Europe.
By the way, Fernando, you´ve forgotten some countries in your list... (that should be in alphabetical order... -just teasing you here, hehe- ;) I´m starting to think of a nice little trip to a DrupalCon SouthAmerica in... Guyana, right there in the Club Med... hehe ;)
Anyway, hope you can have a nice meeting with Victor at the DrupalCon and have a great time!!!!!!!
Rosamunda
+1 for option 2
+1 for option 2
I agree English version of any post would be needed. Another option that I thought before like translating everything would be a little bit chaotic.
I think if anyone writtes a post on english, it would be easy to translate it to one's own language.
Estoy de acuerdo en que se necesitaría una versión en inglés para cada post. Otra opción que había pensado, del estilo de traducir todo, podría ser un poco caótica.
Pienso que si alguien escribe un post en inglés, debería ser sencillo traducirlo a su propia lengua.
I was tempted to post a few
I was tempted to post a few thoughts about this.
As a first thought, I think drupalCon main language should be Spanish. My bases for this is that it's the language spoken in most countries in South America. Brazil it's a big issue, because although it's one country, they're huge. On their side, I think quite a few people speak or at least follow conversations in Spanish.
However, setting a main language should not make that the only language available for sessions. You can have a variety of different sessions conducted in different languages. There might be sessions that can be done twice in different languages as well. I think there should be a nice mix enough to attract everybody to come here, even those who speaks only one language.
I just feel that most attendants will be from SouthAmerica. Traveling around here is cheap, but it's not so cheap to get here from other countries (Europe and some parts of the US).
About texts, as I haven't been to any DrupalCon yet, I am not sure how that works, but ideally they should all be in all three languages: Eng, Spa and Portuguese.
Thank you hanoii, don't
Thank you hanoii, don't worry about the order of countries, I'll be writing them in different order every time :).
If you know active communities from other countries in South America please let us know, I would like to contact them :)
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More 2 cents
Is funny to hear people saying that in Brazil we don't have "spanish classes". Of course, but is the same to the english. We're a portuguese country with a poor education (including to portuguese).
But for brazilian people is easy to understand spanish (more than spanish people understand portuguese) and if we use the example of Masstrich and/or Paris here, we can make a big mistake. We're "just" 200 million people speaking portuguese and the same number speaking spanish (in South America, of course). For this, this example doesn't work very well.
To a SA event, I think that we can use the spanish language very well and everybody can understand. Just for comment, I'm back from Chile and is hard to find someone speaking english there. So, if we use the Shakespeare language to develop an event here, the language can be a factor to eliminate a lot of participants and a lot of good regional ideas.
Remember, we have different ways to see everything here and an american how-to sometimes doesn't work here.
Best
Paulino Michelazzo
http://www.michelazzo.com.br
Yes, I'm Brazilian and we don't speak Spanish here (but I can speak too).
Scenarios
It was my fault to not specify the scenarios. This thread is about the language to use in this group, it has nothing to do with the languages which are going to be used in the event. For the latst one, we have to define the host city first. My apologize.
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Spanish
My vote is to spanish.
Cheers
Paulino Michelazzo
http://www.michelazzo.com.br
Paulino Michelazzo
http://www.michelazzo.com.br
Yes, I'm Brazilian and we don't speak Spanish here (but I can speak too).
I think it would be
I think it would be unacceptable to exclude any of the 3 languages entirely from the conference. Many non-native Drupaleros are confident reading and writing English, but not speaking or listening.
Given the event will occur in a continent with essentially 0 countries where English is an official language (or even widely used (Guyana is insignificant for this purpose), and it is the first of it's kind, we should be doing everything we can to embrace Drupaleros regardless of their language abilities.
In other words, I think DCSA has to be tri-lingual. In order to best cater for attendees language preferences and needs, I propose a few key things that need special consideration early in the planning;
Start collecting intentions of attendance as soon as possible, at least 6 months out. This would be like a free, non-obliging, pre-registration. This will help you gauge interest levels, estimate size, and (importantly for this discussion) find out what languages are spoken in what quantities amongst the people who plan to attend. You need to find what languages each person speaks, listens, reads and writes, and whether they can do so fluently (comparable to their native language), technically (could have a technical discussion or give a presentation), or just communicatively (E.g. find the bathroom, introduce oneself).
Similarly, perhaps as part of the same campaign even, you should solicit session proposals early, and find what language/s your presenters want to present in, and what languages they would be able to take questions in (then repeat them in the session's primary language).
Once you have a good idea of what languages people can use and present in, then you will have a good idea of how diverse the use of each language will be, and be able to spot areas of conflict. For example, you might find that 80% of your attendees are not confident enough in English to follow a technical presentation, but that 80% of your speakers want to present in English. This would significantly impact the value of DCSA for a large portion of your market.
However having this information gives you plenty of time to;
* Encourage EN presenters who already speak ES/PT as a second language to present in ES/PT, or in multiple languages (This could be messy, though may be more accurate than having a Translator)
* Encourage EN presenters to improve their ES/PT (And to take some classes)
* Consider contracting professional translators for the sessions (Don't try to get volunteers to do this unless they are also professional translators – it's too hard)
Find out how much translators cost and budget for it. Expect to need to prioritize which sessions are most popular, and most in need of translators, since it may be too costly or impractical to hire translators for both languages for every track. Translators should accompany the presenter out of the room and be available to assist with any questions the audience has for them.
It's important to educate presenters on how to speak clearly so that audience members who speak other languages will be able to understand them.
The schedule should state clearly what languages each session is presented in primarily, and if it will be available in other languages through a translator or otherwise.
Translators will probably need extensive briefing on Drupal terminology, so they can be prepared for it. They should also be consistent on the words they use. E.g. is 'view' translated to 'vista' or is the English term used because it's technical? Does 'Drupaleros' refer to the Spanish-speaking Drupal community, or does it mean the same as Drupalistas/Drupalers?
Bevan/
Bevan/
Thanks for this valuable
Thanks for this valuable information!
You given us a good start point. It is supposed that Drupal Association is waiting for some serious proposal draft, and what you pointed here is what I consider as priority.
So, for our proposal I suggest:
1. Clear explanation about language issues.
2. Express the need of a subdomain: sa2010.drupalcon.org, in order to start collecting the valuable data for our proposal.
3. Explain what kind of data we need and why we should start with and official sub-domain.
4. Anything else you consider that Drupal Association should read for this first proposal issue.
And sorry guys, but me included, I feel we are moving a bit slow, May 2010 is right after the corner.
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language and next steps
I mostly agree with Bevan's points, but I think it is a bit premature to focus on language at the conference. It will likely be in multiple languages (Drupalcon Barcelona did this as well). The language issue will likely depend on the venue (if it is in Brazil there will be more PT presentations than if it is in an ES native country).
For this group, I am happy with either English or ES/PT with translation to EN seems like a reasonable solution as well.
Progress on the Conference
I think the progress so far is quite good. We have 2 camps next weekend (one in Centroamerica, but it is close) with planning under way for Buenos Aires Drupalcamp. I think the most important work for the next 3 months is:
We need to demonstrate that the South American community is successful in hosting events. @develCuy - I know you have hosted wonderful events in Cuzco and @wundo has in Brazil as well but I don't think that people outside of South America have a strong sense about the success of those events (yet). There is great advice about this in Drupal Camp Group at the top of that group there are lots of links and more specifically in the Drupalcamp Organizers Guide
GVS Sponsorships for Camps in Central/South America
Further off topic, but related to getting successful camps under way, my company has decided to sponsor camps in Central/South America in 2010.
* Sponsorships for travel for the Drupalcamp Centroamerica
* General sponsorship for Drupalcamp Brazil
* your event here!
If it would be helpful, please contact me.
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I see I misread the initial
I see I misread the initial post here. I thought this was ONLY about DCSA, and not about discussion on this GDO group.
Bevan/
Bevan/
Conclusión / Conclusion
De acuerdo a la Encuesta, tenemos 3 posiciones definidas!
Pero la respuesta ganadora es: "Español o Portugués con Traducción en Inglés". Estoy de acuerdo con la comunidad :), así que hagamos avanzar la pelota!
¿Podemos cerrar este tema ahora?
English
According to the Poll, we have 3 defined positions!
But the wining answer is: "Spanish or Portuguese with English Translation". I agree with the community :), so lets move the ball one yard forward!
¿May we close this topic now?
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(3 John 1:2) Dear friend, I pray that you may enjoy good health and that all may go well with you, even as your soul is getting along well.
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