Chess.com Feedback: Internationalization w/ Different Languages?

I wanted to open up the topic of internationalizing Chess.com for discussion. It is something certainly on our minds. Here are my thoughts:

In theory it sounds great => Open up Chess.com to new languages so that more people can enjoy the site like we do in English! But let's dig deeper into the implications:

First off, there are 2 kinds of "text" on Chess.com: stuff that we write (menu bar, instructions, about pages, help files, navigation, directions, etc), and then stuff that members write (profile pages, forums, news, events, articles, comments, votechess comments, game chat, quiz questions, etc).

We can pretty straightforwardly translate all of the Chess.com text (we would get your help of course!). But what do we do with the rest? We could have Google translate a news article, but then what?

Here are a few scenarios to consider:

- you go to look for a new chess game and you see game seeks in tons of different languages

- you read a new article and then below it you find that only 20% of the comments are in your language.

- you get matched with an opponent in a tournament and you can't talk to each other

- you want to browse BLOGS and find that only 10% of them are in your language

- you enter a vote chess game and the discussion is a huge mix of languages

There are technical implications for all of this (re-templating, adding columns to the database, re-working queries to filter by language, etc), but we are more concerned with the cohesiveness of the community. For now you at least assume that you can communicate somewhat with almost everyone on the site.

Please think through your response before you post. Comments like "it's a good thing" don't really help. :)

Thoughts?

I've played a lot of games here now, with people from many countries and rarely find language a difficulty (less than 1%). Most people seem to have a grasp of English on this site, those with faltering English seem keen to improve (a useful skill in these "globalised" days). Different languages posting simultaneously in the same forums? Can't see it working. I suspect there will be little call (percentage-wise) for such an improvement. Perhaps, I'm a little biased, though.

Honestly, I think it would be detrimental to the community.  Chess games *could* be conducted without any verbal communication between members, but if that's all I wanted I'd be on FICS.  The articles, the analysis, the forums, the team games & groups, getting to know folks from all over the world -- that's what makes a community, and it's what sets chess.com apart.  None of that works if no one can understand each other.  For better or for worse, English is the de facto language of the Internet.

I personally think, due to the issues Eric already stated, that a site such as this would not function properly in several languages. Members, of course, are free to post things they write in languages other than English. However, since I cannot speak French, I miss out on the valuable insights these members contribute to chess.com.

Therefore, I think if translation is implemented, it must be able to go both to and from. In other words, whatever language I choose as default for "my" chess.com, I should be able to see every written word on the site in that language (apart from live chat). I may be short-sighted, but I don't see how that's possible.

but that is the "success bias" - meaning that those people are ON the site because they can get by with enough english. if we open up the site to other languages, you would then have people with NO english skills.

Esparanto?

Be interesting to hear from people for whom English is a second, or third, language.

Note: English is the lingua franca of business and international relations in Asia; its the only language which is shared.

There are a lot of people who just loved the site but don't feel like playing here because they don't understand English.

I do support Internationalization.

That's a very good point erik, one that I hadn't thought of, for sure. Guess I was just giving the opinion of a satisfied customer, rather than the informed opinion of a webpreneur. You want more members naturally enough, but should be careful not to destroy what you've created. Imagine the following scenario.... you open the site up to all languages, many new non-English speaking paying members join, the site morphs into something you don't like.... are you going to give those subscriptions back if you change your mind? It's a one way ticket. I'm often reminded of the old adage "if it ain't broke, don't mend it".

OKay, here are my thoughts on this.

1. you dont necessarily have to talk to your opponent to enjoy a chess game, but it is certainly fun. Chess is pretty universal.

2. It is easy enough to code the page to display in multiple languages and just have it display the language that appropriate to the person browsing the site based on the location of their ISP address (and of course you could have little flag icons at the top to change the language of the interface).

3. as far as communicating goes, if they included a new button at the top of the posting window (maybe near thier flag icon or something) that automatically hot-linked to babelfish or google or something the script could be set up to automatically fill in the users language based on "preferences" in thier profiles and it would know user A speaks German and user B speaks Italian, and it could display a new window with the translated text. It would take time to implement, and it wouldnt be 100% accurate, but it would be close enough to facilitate an understanding and I think that it would be awesome!

     My browser, as long as there are other languages offered by the website, will display the one I choose first, second, and so on. So all of the seeks (not really sure about live chess) and blogs should appear in the users preferred language. As I stated earlier, this only applies to websites that offer more than one language. You might want to play around with it and see if it would work. I am not completely sure.

Erik:

If cohesiveness of the community is the goal, then consider the following from Wikipedia:

"English is the language most often studied as a foreign language in the European Union (by 89% of schoolchildren), followed by French (32%), German (18%), and Spanish (8%).[40] In the EU, a large fraction of the population reports being able to converse to some extent in English. Among non-English speaking countries, a large percentage of the population claimed to be able to converse in English in the Netherlands (87%), Sweden (85%), Denmark (83%), Luxembourg (66%), Finland (60%), Slovenia (56%), Austria (53%), Belgium (52%), and Germany (51%).[41] Norway and Iceland also have a large majority of competent English-speakers.

Also note that:

"English is the primary language in Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Australia (Australian English), the Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, Belize (Belizean Kriol), the British Indian Ocean Territory, the British Virgin Islands, Canada (Canadian English), the Cayman Islands, the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guam, Guernsey (Channel Island English), Guyana, Ireland (Hiberno-English), Isle of Man (Manx English), Jamaica (Jamaican English), Jersey, Montserrat, Nauru, New Zealand (New Zealand English), Pitcairn Islands, Saint Helena, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Singapore, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the United Kingdom, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the United States.

In many other countries, where English is not the most spoken language, it is an official language; these countries include Botswana, Cameroon, Dominica, Fiji, the Federated States of Micronesia, Ghana, Gambia, India, Kenya, Kiribati, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malta, the Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Namibia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palau, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines (Philippine English), Puerto Rico, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, Saint Lucia, Samoa, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. It is also one of the 11 official languages that are given equal status in South Africa (South African English). English is also the official language in current dependent territories of Australia (Norfolk Island, Christmas Island and Cocos Island) and of the United States (Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa and Puerto Rico), former British colony of Hong Kong, and Netherlands Antilles.

English is not a de jure official language of Israel; however, the country has maintained official language use a de facto role for English since the British mandate."

So, it would appear that the vast majority of the erudite world population speaks English (perhaps 75%+ ?), therefore, what is truly to be gained with the tremendous effort that will be required to make such a change, not to mention all of the negative issues you posed and others unmentioned?

It seems to me that the upside gain here (cohesiveness of the community and perhaps the addition of some number of new members) is far exceeded by the downside risk (effort to implement such a change with the attending issues that will affect current members).

Having said that, my mind is still open.

You could start off like you said by translating all Chess.com text to other languages (let users do it). For the content, I wouldn't use Google translate. Let the articles be in the language they're in. I would suggest that for example all articles get tagged with the language they're in. Then, a user can specify in their profile which languages they want to and can read, so that when the user searches for articles or sees front page articles, he only sees articles with the tag of one of the languages he understands.

For games, matches, discussions etc., you'll always have a mix, and you can't solve that (you could make different language subforums of the forum though), but content like articles, blogs, news, could all be tagged with a language. Then you get more people only understanding that language to this site, who can then contribute in their language, and the non-English content will automatically grow.

It would be better to have every language but since it's virtually impossible to do that, have you ever heard about Interlingua?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua

It's understandable to hundreds of millions of people who speak a Romance language like Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian etc.

The other can of worms that this would open is: How many languages are you going to include?  I don't even know how many are actually in use today, but I'm sure it's a huge number.  Someone is bound to feel left out.

What do you call someone who speaks two languages?

Bi-lingual.

What do you call someone who speaks three languages?

Tri-lingual.

What do you call someone who speaks one language?

An American.

i dont mind having internallization,  i think it might help. But this should NOT be a priority issue. There are many better things that you could use your time on right now, this could take months, and not many people would be affected.

Gosh!

I have played folks all over the world on several chess sites and English has always worked. It is the international language. 

A funny story: I went to a Spanish Immersion course in Spain. Spanish only spoken until the breaks. The canteen chatter among students and staff, who were from all over Europe and the US, was almost exclusively in English. 

Resources should improve this site and multi-lingual efforts would cause more problems then solve.

We should just split the site into sections (a LOT like the { insert lanuage } specific rooms. If live can do it, we can do it...

By all means provide the buttons, menus, Help text in several languages. This will enable more non-English speakers to use the site facilities. Even this step will lead to complications as new members use the 'Help & Support' forum category to enquire about options most of us won't understand - but loads of others will understand the enquiry and are likely to respond.

The GROUPs mechanism makes it possible for any language group to communicate with each other in their native language. It would be an idea to point non-English-speaking newcomers towards a group (or groups) speaking their language (where these exist).

I don't recall seeing ANY topics with non-English titles. If you were to publicise that you wish to encourage it (perhaps as an experiment for 3 months), this would be a first step towards assessing interest from non English speakers. The topic locking mechanism will need to be robust where discussions decend into name-calling using non-English terminology.

Erik. Make a page that people can open up where they can copy text such as when playing a game against someone or a comment in forums and then they can translate it on this seperate page into another language. Also if they wanted to comment in forums but only know russian for example. they can use the translation page to type what they want to say in russian and then translate that back into english so that they can speak in the forums.