Re: german mailinglist for lilypond?

[Matthias Kilian]

On Fri, Nov 26, 2004 at 07:17:48PM +0000, Anthony W. Youngman wrote:
> [...] Why shouldn't people post to the mailing 
> list in other languages if their English isn't good enough? It just 
> means that they are going to get less help because fewer people will 
> understand the question :-)

That could lead to length spanish, turkish, icelandic, french,
whatever threads, i.e. traffic that most probably will be understood
by only a fraction of the list members. And until there's no consensus
on the list that other languaes then the international language[1]
may be used, such non-english threads *may* annoy people and let
them complain.

I've experienced this some years ago in a newsgroup clearly marked
as international, i.e. english speaking: one over-length spanish
(IIRC) thread, one polite request to speak english, and one hell
of flamewar. Of course, that's the worst case ever possible, and
unlikely to happen to the lilypond lists.


After a short discussion with Roland, we concluded to wait some
weeks for additional feedback. If there will be enough (say 10 or
more) users interested, I'll set up a german mailinglist, with the
purpose to help those who don't speak english even worse than me,
and with the hope that someone will translate and transfer important
topics between both lists. For example, some time ago, Roland had
a problem he couldn't describe properly in english, so he asked me
for help. I tried to help him directly, and IIRC, I also asked on
this list (in english), back-translating suggestions for Roland.

I expect a special german (or french or arabic or ...) list to have
very low traffic and only a few subscribers, if there were only two
or three subscribers speaking *both* languages.

So if anyone else is interested, let me (or better Roland, since
he's collecting feedback) know. 

Just my 2p

Ciao,
        Kili

[1] "Bad English is the international language ;)"
    [Gerardo Santana Gómez Garrido in address@hidden


ps: IIRC, someone recently opened a dutch-speaking mailinglist for
OpenBSD.