There are more than 3000 languages in the world. But let'e be generous and say that only the 20 major languages are seen in the Monastery. Could you imagine how to deal with such a Babel?

Perlmonks exists now for how long? 3, 4 years? Allmost all of those 3000 languages existed for much longer. How many posts in foreign languages have you seen in the history of Perlmonks? Have you had a problem with that "Babel"?

It's an issue that's raised every few months in comp.lang.perl.misc as well. Perl usenet groups predate perlmonks by many years. It gets the occasional posting in German, French, or some other languages. Usually, it gets answered. Most of the time in the same language, but it happens that the replier understands the non-English language well enough to read, but not enough to write, and the answer is given in English. The group copes with foreign language posts fine.

How do you approve posts you don't understand? If it was posted to PerlMonks Discussions, for example, how do you know that it should be approved/moved to Meditations or SOPW?

Eh, you don't? I never approve posts - and perlmonks runs fine. Approving, frontpaging, editing, etc isn't a duty. It'll get done by someone else, or it doesn't get done at all. So what?

How do you address people to the FAQs or the instructions on how to ask questions, which are the basic principles of our community? Are we going to translate each piece of relevant information in every language that shows up? It took about three years to get those documents to the actual state, in one language only. How do we plan to deal with the additional languages?

Do you think it's your duty to reply to each and every question asked? How do you address people to FAQs or instructions when you are on vacation? If you can't understand the question, move on to the next.

Note that the F in FAQ stands for frequently asked. Two Polish questions a year don't make the question frequent. But if questions appear frequently, a FAQ will be made. That is the nature of forums like this.

Furthermore, the fact they don't know English well enough to write it, doesn't mean they cannot read English. They got here after all. They managed to learn (some) Perl. I wouldn't be able to post in German. But my knowledge of the language is good enough to be able to understand many written texts.

How do you consider a post for editing, deletion, promotion, if you don't know what is it talking about?

Well, you don't. Regardless whether you don't know what they are talking about because you don't understand the language, or whether you have no knowledge of the topic being discussed. You'd move on and leave the editing, deleting, promoting, etc to others. Perlmonks is a community effort - it runs fine even if you skip an article or two.

Besides, you are an anonymous monk. Anonymous monks don't have editing or deleting powers anyway. ;-)

Abigail

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