Is there any "official policy" on using other languages at LW site? If there is, perhaps it should be more visible. If there isn't, let's think about some guidelines.
I think it would be nice to provide a place for people speaking other languages, but on the hand, we should not fragment the community unnecessarily. Good new ideas that arise in non-English discussions should be translated back to English.
People speaking other languages than English should be encouraged to write an article in their language. The title of a non-English article should start with a ISO 639-1 language code, like this: "[sk] Môj článok". This convention could be later used by software to provide a list of articles in given language, or use a correct HTML language tag.
The discussion should be in the same language as the original article, if possible. If someone has only a passive knowledge of given language, they can answer e.g. in English, but generally it is preferred to answer in the same language.
If the article and the following discussion is just a translation of existing English content, or it is wholly related to use of the given language (for example discussions about LW wiki localization), or if it has very low karma, then it is not important for English speakers. In other cases someone should later translate the article in English, perhaps also with selected parts of discussion.
The author of non-English article by posting their article implicitly consents to anyone later posting the English translation of their article, on LW. I hope it is safe to assume that people who post on LW in English also wouldn't mind the translations of their texts, if the translation is published on LW.
Hello Less Wrongers.
I'm still relatively new to the LW community, but I would like to share with you a few comments and ideas for making LW a better place for non-native English speakers.
There are two classes of people among non-native English speakers (of course, those boundaries are fuzzy) :
The problems are of course different between 1. and 2., but yet I can see ways to improve things to both categories.
Moderately fluent English speakers
Being a member of 1., here are my feelings after a few months of lurking and then trying to participate a bit in LW, from my own French pov :
I don't have any magical solution from 1., except for anyone to try to be more careful when stating things which are culture-dependant, but it's part of the most general problem of excepting short inferential distances.
For 2., I'm wondering if it would be possible to have some LW to volunteer to review articles done by non-native English speakers, and improve the English quality, before the article is published to LW in general. Do you think the idea is good overall ? Would any of you volunteer to do that ? If so, it would be nice to include a paragraph about it, or at least a link to a page explaining the modality (how to submit an article to that team, ...), on the Welcome to Less Wrong page.
Non-English speakers
I don't think non-English speakers (or people with only basic English skills) can reasonably participate on LW itself, of course. But there are ways to still be able to offer them ways to become stronger, I'm thinking about translation.
Right now I'm helping Adrien with the French translation of HP:MoR. There are also attempts to translate some parts of the Sequences into other languages. In the mirror way of the "having native English speaker to help correct the English of non-native", us the non-native can help by participating to the various translation efforts. But that give raise to several questions :
Any opinion on those suggestions ? Any volunteer for joining some of the teams ? Anyone from "the staff" who could answer about the legal issues, and about the opportunity of including those pointers in the "Welcome to Less Wrong" page ?