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Most ideas on the Halfbakery are posted in English. However, a few are written in one or more other languages. Among these, I believe that French is the most commonly represented.
From what little French I can still understand, most of these seem to be fairly competent ideas. From the vast quantity
I cannot understand, I strongly suspect that these ideas contain technical details, puns, and numerous other humorous and informative details. As the authors also post ideas in English, I assume that using the French language is chosen as an intrensic part of the idea.
From what little understanding most english speakers have regarding French culture, I suspect that these ideas are not getting an entirely fair shake with regards to the voting. Aside from the various stereotypes English-speaking individuals tend to have towards the French, there is the practical inconvenience. While having an idea written in English does not guarantee that it makes sense, having it written in another language makes it that much less likely.
From what I know about myself, I also suspect that my french speaking compatriots might prefer a halfbakery, or similarly designed webspace wherein mostly French ideas could be found. I seem to recall that the HB got a larger server a year or two ago, so if there's an interst, and there's room, then perhaps it's time for an alternate language version... or a way to search by language.
Some of my assumtions may be wrong. It may be that the French speakers are perfactly happy with the current situation. It could be that the voting is indeed fair, or that fairness isn't a concern. I'll freely admit that I look for biases, and we do tend to find what we look for.
If I'm wrong, that's all right by me. The halfbakery's a big enough place for both languages as far as I'm concerned. I just thought maybe this sort of a change could be for the better, and I didn't see any discussion on it elsewhere.
In Search of Lost Women
A_20La_20Recherche_..._20Femmes_20Perdues
I think a simpler solution is just to add a Babelfish link, like I have done to this idea. [hippo, Apr 03 2009]
[link]
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Although I lack the patience to try to figure out the French-language ideas, I do like the fact that there is no language-specific version of the HB; ideas just get posted, and if no-one understands them, whether because of the language or because of the complexity, they're unlikely to do well. I don't think there's any need to segregate; there doesn't seem to be a problem to fix. |
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So [-], because the occasional glimpse into another language is one of the good things about the HB. |
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I think a better solution would be a program embedded in the Halfbakery that automatically translates everything into English, and if a user is a speaker of another language, translate everything else into their language. This would be user-selected in the Overview Edit screen, or by simply requesting a Moderator to set it up for your account. It would have to be a very good translator program, though. My web browser has a page translator that works well, the only trouble is that it translates everything literally, word for word, so much still gets lost in the context. |
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If I were fluent only in some minor league language but wanted to communicate my thoughts more widely, I would put them out there in my language for my neighbors and greataunt to read, then immediately underneath post a google translation to whatever I thought the majority of my readers would understand. |
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I might then edit the translated version and put my native cusswords back in, because they are intrinsically superior. |
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I'm kinda with [dbmag] on this one. I wouldn't want a foreign language (non-English to me) to be automatically translated. I really like seeing the odd French idea; I like trying to unravel the thing. The caveat, I guess, is that such ideas are rare and normally posted by bakers that usually post in English so they not only have a surprise element, they are also deliberately novel. |
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Yes, I've often imagined that the choice of french was to allow some particularly good puns to be included, that simply don't work in English. |
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I can see how filtering out the foreign language might detract from the HB feel. I'm fairly sure that translating software simply isn't up to the task of converting a good French HB idea into a good english HB idea. |
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What about a way to search by language? This would, of course, require language tags to be included, which would require some additional programming. That may or may not be easier, but as the rare French (or otherwise not-in-English) idea is such a treat, some of us might like to seek them out more easily. |
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You just need some kind of shibboleth for the ideas, along the lines of the infamous Ooolongftangftangbank User Scheme. There may be one lurking in the respective languages already. There exists software which uses a more sophisticated many-to-one version of this idea to detect which language a given piece of text is written in. |
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or you could just ignore it. |
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[-] You are overlooking that the halfbakery was in fact invented by someone french and as with most multicultural places on the net, english eventually took over as the primary language. |
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French people are allowed to use the .net! We must have forgotten to include that in the terms at Agincourt. |
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