Still no supervision in the French and Spanish forums?

Hello Nigel,

I said that it took me some decades to understand it myself. To put it simply, it means that people in charge of any business running for profit have a marked tendendy to be highly suspicious of people who offer them anything for free. The net result being that, most often than not, they end by ignoring the help been offered. As in this case.

For your information, JC offered to compensate my efforts for improving the forums in Spanish in a non monetary way (by providing me with free copies of some Adobe software), but I have never taken his word for it. Normally I wouldn't have mentioned this in public, but I find your suspicion not only unfounded, but offensive.

Are soliciting Adobe for payment to translate the forums into Spanish?

If that's the case, this is probably not the best place to do so. I know at least one forum member who questions solicitation/advertising on the forums.

If that's not the case please accept my apologies, but I fail to understand your final paragraph.

I wanted to check something in the thread where this discussion originated, and when I clicked on the link in my opening message in this topic, I received this (slightly ironic?) message:

>The item ".3bb89335/7" does not exist, it may have been deleted.

And as I don't want the same thing to happen with this thread, here I am bringing it once more to the top of the list.

It would unfortunately seem that DorothyK was right when she wrote

>Until and unless someone is in there with host rights, not much will happen.

However, I think that Pierre has shown in the forums in French, and I in the forums in Spanish, that it is not necessary to grant host rights to anyone who doesn't pass the double screening process in order to polish those forums. I, at least, have no desire to be granted such rights, and I am not even asking for collaboration. All I would need is permission from Adobe Fenwick to continue the process that I was carrying with JC, brutally interrupted about a year and a half ago, to be replaced by absolute inactivity.

I would think that almost everyone posting questions in the forums in Spanish does so because of an insufficient knowledge of the English language. It must therefore be at least disconcerting for them to find pages partially or totally written in English, when it would be so easy to have them all written in proper Spanish.

In a conversation with one of my teachers, shortly after I graduated, he gave me the following bit of advise: "Claudio, never offer to do any job for free". He didn't explain any further, so it has taken me several decades to realize and understand the wisdom in his words ...

Yes, Pierre, it is a truly vicious circle: we are too few because the forums are not properly attended, and they are not properly attended because we are too few. That's why I have concentrated on something I know I can do if there was interest: make the Spanish ones at least decently written and presented. I also try to encourage attendance to the forums by striving to be particularly gentle and helpful for the newcomers who post in the wrong forum or in existing threads.

I think Adobe Spain should publicize the Spanish forums, but on its site I can only find a rather hidden link to them.

Mods are not only needed to calm down discussions, moving topics to the relevant location is useful too. There is not that much participation because those forums are new. There are way bigger participation in existing "French-speaking" forums (that are properly managed, advertized, etc.)

Ramón, I know you didn't post all that data for me, and it's good that you have posted it. I also know that the problem not only involves Adobe. Just to cite one example: from the appearance of the first Apple portable models, almost every portable sold by Apple in this country has come with an English keyboard, and most also with an OS in English.

However, I am only in a small campaign to try to get the Spanish forums to be fully written in proper Spanish, and perhaps also supervised by a couple of hosts/moderators -which experience has shown not to be all that necessary, perhaps because we are still too few. This is why I have tried to avoid contaminating the discussions here with other issues. I am willing to try to get something out of Adobe almost singlehanded, but trying to change industry wide attitudes is a bit too much for me.

Claudio,

At this point I don't see a lack-of-supervision issue at all but a massive lack-of-participation problem.

Contrary to what a lot of people assume, native Spanish speakers on this planet easily outnumber native English speakers*. It's only when you add speakers of the language as a second or foreign language that the numbers are comparable, though still with a slight edge to the Spanish speakers.

When you think in terms of market penetration, however, I don't think the Spanish-speaking markets are as significant to Adobe. The relative little interest demonstrated in the Spanish forums reflect that.

Sure, Spanish is indeed the third most spoken language in the world, after Mandarin and Hindi; but given the absence of an Adobe forum in either one of the first two languages (at least to my knowledge), I don't think we should be expecting more at this time.

-----

* For sources on the above figures refer to the World bank, the Ethnologue and the World Almanac.

This is my monthly update of this topic; I have no intention to let it die.

The forums in Spanish still have many pages in English, or in a mixture of English and bad Spanish. For reasons that should be crystal clear by now to anyone who has followed this thread, I feel reluctant to spend time in producing decent translations of anything longer than a few words. What is worse, JC also seems reluctant to spend much time in changing large bits of text, also for (at least to me) obvious reasons. He has cooperated very willingly and efficiently in resolving functional problems, such as the impossibility of some users (myself included) to add new topics in the Spanish forums. But that would be all.

I have my doubts that we really need a person "that has an appropriate temperment that the host team would consider to be a good candidate for joining the team" (a double personality screening: one for becoming a candidate, and another to become a member?), just for ensuring that all pages of the Spanish forums are written in proper Spanish and are fully functional. We did manage to get a small part of this job done before the takeover, and as the whole "team" was just JC and me, there were no personality conflicts; on the contrary. Of course, continuing this task would not only require permission from a still undisclosed authority, but also to trust my knowledge of the English and Spanish languages, and of the structures of the forums in English and Spanish. Which would seem to be considered an unacceptable risk at some higher quarters.

As for the need of hosts/moderators, I would tend to agree that the double personality screening could be necessary to nominate them. Which unfortunately would seem to leave out all of the most active participants, for they are either too young and unexperienced, or too old to try to act as yes men. Fortunately, excepting the dog fight I mentioned in a previous message, self regulation has been functioning surprisingly well; more often than not, a polite message asking for sanity (from the older), or a not very saintly joke (from the younger) has been enough to restore peace.

I know that if I mentioned the L***ge, I would get a lot of replies, most of them sympathetic. However, there is one case of someone who doesn't understand and doesn't care about the problem, but feels compelled to post nasty remarks which for the author may seem witty, and I somehow feel we don't really need such "help".

Thanks, Gustavo and Dave!

>understand what I was trying to say, and didn't for the sake of brevity.

I did claudio, as would most of the lounge regulars, i think... but statements like that make those who aren't familiar with the lounge think it's nothing more than a den of acrimony. I did understand where you were coming from and no offense was taken by me.

cheers and good luck getting a permanant mod in your forum,
dave