[easy]

Players!! We have hundreds of non english speaking players here on BBO. I would love to have their input with regard to European/south american/asian bridge systems, events etc. But i see only 4 posts on the international boards. Anyone have any ideas as to how to encourage our international players to get involved here?  Maybe we should get the "yellows" ) post the announcement of the forum in french, spanish and italian. (those seem to be the predominant international groups here on bbo.....other than our many Bulgarian stars LOL)

[skrshawk]

Hello,
I too would like to fix this but am not certain the best way to make this happen.  I looked into the possibility of allowing the entire template to becoming language swappable but it would only do it for everyone; I can't set it to let users pick their language.

I wish I could do more to support multilingual assets on  BBO but seeing as one language is quite enough for me, all I can do is just put myself behind those who can make this happen.

We'll see what we can do .

Thanks,
John

[hrothgar]

Quote

Players!! We have hundreds of non english speaking players here on BBO. I would love to have their input with regard to European/south american/asian bridge systems, events etc. But i see only 4 posts on the international boards. Anyone have any ideas as to how to encourage our international players to get involved here?  Maybe we should get the "yellows" ) post the announcement of the forum in french, spanish and italian. (those seem to be the predominant international groups here on bbo.....other than our many Bulgarian stars LOL)

SPANISH???

Sadly, I don't think that there are any precise numbers regarding the geographical breakdown of BBO participants, however, my rough guess would be that the top five countries represented are

1. French
2.  Italian
3.  Polish
4.  Turkish
5   United States

[uday]

The top 5 countries during last week were

24% USA
11% Italy
10% France
9%  Canada
7%  Poland

I compiled this without regard to uniqueness; that is, someone who logged in twice from Canada was counted twice.

For what it is worth,  

Dominica,French Polynesia,Georgia and Senegal occupy the other end of the list.

I used the freeware version of  geoIPlookup to convert IP addresses into countries with, supposedly, about 95% accuracy.  

[csdenmark]

I am not sure I really understand the problem but I would like to draw your attention to the Alta Vista translation site. It is free to use, free to build into other web-sites. The address is here:
http://altavista.com/babelfish/

Once I had problems reading an italian web-site I used Alta Vista and now I understand. In that way I can communicate with people not able to communicate in english. I contacted the administrator of the italian web-site for Quadri Italia bridge system and now the whole world is able to read about this marvellous system. Test is yourself:
http://www.playslam..../miniintro.html

Above text duplicated into spanish, a language which I dont understand a word of and there I cannot guarantee for quality of this translation:

No soy seguro yo realmente entiendo el problema sino que quisiera dibujar su atención al sitio de la traducción de Alta Vista. Está libre utilizar, libre construir en otros tela-sitios. La dirección está aquí: http://altavista.com/babelfish/ Una vez que tuviera problemas que leía un tela-sitio italiano que utilicé Alta Vista y ahora entiendo. De esa manera puedo comunicarme con la gente no capaz de comunicarse en inglés. Entré en contacto con a administrador del tela-sitio italiano para el sistema del puente de Quadri Italia y el mundo entero puede ahora leer sobre este sistema maravilloso. Pruebe es usted mismo: http://www.playslam..../miniintro.html Sobre el texto duplicado en español, una lengua de la cual no entienda una palabra y allí no puedo garantizar para la calidad de esta traducción:

Claus - csdenmark  

[Mike]

Our modern day esperanto is English. Those who have it as mothertong are lucky. Those who have it as second language are lucky too.

What I want to point out is rather then raising language barriers with separate, e.g. Polish, Spanish, Hungarian, etc. rooms, better if BBO with its simple existence and popularity helps the less fortunate to learn some (bridge) English. Or the other way around following  Csdenmark's excellent example.

It is not bad at all if the strive to communicate forces people to learn an other language (a well known method in language teaching). Myself, I would very wellcome a spell checker (button) where typing is permitted.

By the way, a forum is usually limited in its public. Look rgb the web bridge forum. Year-in year-out the majority of postings are coming from the very same people.