Omnimaga
Omnimaga => Site Feedback and Questions => Topic started by: DJ Omnimaga on March 30, 2010, 03:48:52 am
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I was wondering if in the future we get a few more french forum users and maybe a few more dutch ones, if it would be nice to ressurect the old dutch and french boards we had on the old forums for a while in 2007? Back then, it didn't work too well due to the lack of active forum users, but now, we have 4 active people who speak french (me, AaroneusTheGreat, juju1234 and Silver Shadow) and maybe in the future we may get more. Also, I think we got a few dutch members as well and maybe there are others who might join, since there are a lot of dutch users in the TI community. For now I would wait of course, but if we get more of those people, maybe it could be useful, for example, if people need some calc help or want to share their stuff in multiple langages or native language? Keep in mind that only french and dutch would be included since we don't have enough german/portuguese/spanish users. Each sections would have a calc discussion/showcase subforum and a off-topic one.
EDIT: as mentionned later in a post below (by me), it also feels a bit strange that Omnimaga is almost entirely in english even though in its first entire two years of existence, everything Omnimaga-related was in french. Even the site was originally gonna start in french :P
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Eh, moi aussi je parle le français, mais ce n'est pas ma langue maternelle. Une partie de ma famille est francophone.
As for us Dutch users, we already have two calculator fora (but one of them (scholieren.be) has started to become a noobz 'n trollz place), the other one, www.ti-wereld.nl, is still OK, though. Ressurecting the French subfora is definitely a good idea, and maybe Dutch is worth a try.
Nederlands verovert de wereld! :P (Dutch exam today, btw. The only one I might flunk, but I don't really care. I hate that class...)
PS: Got word from the math teacher that everyone passed the [math] exam.
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The idea of giving calculator help and support in the native language seems attractive. Omnimaga was really complete back then.
Even there aren't enough users for a full sub-forum it could exist an international one where any language is permitted and you indicate the language by an English tag indicating the language. For example, for a German topic the title has to start with "[German]". The only problem is we can't assure support to every language so better make a sticky that tells if there is a regular user than can help in some language.
It would be fun to me start learning French. :) Do you know any good website for that? I will use google translate for a while but I will really need a good website/ebook to learn French.
EDIT:
I could definitely be the "responsible" for Portuguese topics. I could try to write Spanish, although I warn it may sometimes decay to "Portuguesish" (Portuguese+Spanish). I know basic German but is very very rusty.
I learned one thing of Dutch, I think, "wereld" is today. xD
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Don't they teach French at school in Portugal? I thought they did in most European countries. In Flanders, we have compulsory French classes as soon as we reach class 5 (that's 10 à 11y). In Brussels, the capital city, and its surroundings, French is obligatory from class 3 onwards iirc. But then again, French is one of our 3 national languages, so... (Flanders: people speak Dutch, Wallonia: people speak French, 'East-Cantons'*: people speak German. Brussels used to be neerlandophonic, but most people speak French now, and all administration is bilingual.)
* Actually a part of Wallonia. this region was annexed after WWI, it used to belong to Germany, so that's why most people speak German. When we were there two years ago on our scouting camp, we 'discovered' that the majority of [older] people didn't speak a word of French... (at least not where we were)
@Galandros: nope. :D Guessed wrongly. Wereld==world. Vandaag==today.
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Mhmm, I think a 3rd international section where all languages are allowed with restrictions would be nice too. What I thought is the following rules:
1) Topic would have to start with [language]
2) Language would need to be avaliable for translating in google language tools
3) Use alphabets (so moderators who don't have japaneese/chineese/korean charsets installed can still moderate these posts)
I would also most likely need to translate the board rules in french/dutch for the two bigger sub forums. However, a dutch user would need to translate the dutch version for me.
@Mapar I wish you good luck with the exam stuff ^^
As for french/dutch forums, there are two z80 forums for each, but one of the french one is inactive and the other one now sometimes have people being rude to new users when they don't understand fast enough about calc stuff. It used to be better on that sense but it seems to have changed in the past few months, which is sad considering it's mostly a help forum. For the other dutch one, TI-Wereld, it seemed ok, except I noticed an user was getting harrassed from time to time there and one of the user I will not name has a strong bias against BASIC projects, meaning he sometimes troll BASIC threads with how ASM is much better and the like. In a french Omnimaga subforum this wouldn't happen, same for dutch.
Another thing I just remembered now: Omnimaga used to be a french-only thing. All my calc games used to all be in french and the site was originally gonna start in french, until I noticed nobody cared about RPGs in the french TI community. It feels a bit weird that Omnimaga is pretty much only english now when it was entirely french for its first two entire years. From the creation of Omnimaga on September 1st 2001 until November 2003, everything Omnimaga-related was just in french :P
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I volunteer for the translation of the rules.
@DJ: I think I know who you are talking about ;D But yeah, there's only one real project up at ti-wereld atm. Most stuff we do is helping out students.
EDIT: it's done, I created a separate topic to discuss the translation and scan it for potential unclarities and such.
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Bonne idée DJ :P
I like the idea to internationalize the forums, since not everyone is not native English... I can volunteer too :P
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I had option between French and German. :P
But yes, French has influence through Europe education even after falling behind English.
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Of course, if you speak a foreign language, you automatically get a wider audience if your website is in English.
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For some reasons, I noticed that people from France often don't speak a single word of english, though. I am not sure why but I guessed it was probably because unlike Canada for us, France's only official language is french so english is not as important to learn. In Quebec, we learn both french and english by grade 4, altough for english it always remains a second language.
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I think it's a good idea. (I just doubt if I'd post in that forum.) It could help with all the non-English native speakers. :)
DJ, speaking of those games, when will we get Illusiat 2004 in English? I can't wait to play Illusiat 4! ;D
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that reminds me, I should really finish that one one day...
My TI-Nspire is pretty much free, now. I decided against using Axe Parser on it, because a TI-Nspire is not a good tool to gauge ASM program speed. I prefer testing my game speed on the regular 83+ now so it's more accurate for when I release something. My Nspire now serves as bridge to transfer files to my 83+, because my new PC has no serial port. Basically I send Axe updates/files to my Nspire, then send them to my 83+ from there. This means my Nspire is free for BASIC dev now, meaning maybe I could work some more on Illusiat 2004 (despite the OS 2.54MP display bugs with inverted text... I'm just editing french text anyway...)
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The only problem with this is that some promising projects may appear in a language we don't speak, and we won't notice them straight away.
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yeah that was my only issue with these subforums really. I was worried french/dutch/germans would just announce them in language forums and not bother doing some small updates every now and then in the english projects section. I guess what I will do if we add such subforums is add a pinned topic encouraging foreign language members to also showcase their projects in the english section, even if it's summed up in one or two sentences (instead of describing the projects like crazy, just say "Quest is a 83 RPG in BASIC that will feature many hours of gameplay and good graphics. Here are screenshots!" then post updates as images.
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I'm not sure if it would really be necessary. It seems like the French-speaking audience would mostly hail from Canada, and likely speak English as well. All in all, it seems like it would just be segregating the forum with an exclusive section that English-speaking members can't understand or participate in.
I'm not really sure what the demographics are, though. I could be mistaken. In fact, I'm not really sure what the French / English situation is in Canada. Do sections of the population only speak French, or is it more of a bilingual thing?
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actually we only have two active french canadians (including myself). french canadians typically won't remain interested toward calcs for long, from experience, which is why there are so few on calc forums. Most canadians who remain into calcs a lot are from Alberta and British Columbia it seems. Quebec is mostly french, except Montreal, which is 33% french, 33% english and 33% others. New Brunswick province is 20% french and 80% english and the rest of Canada is pretty much just english. In overall, I think only 10% of Canada speak french.
Calcs are quite popular in france, though. We get french people from there in IRC chans from time to time and there is a huge active french TI forum, which comes in 3rd position in the entire community in terms of activity (behind Omnimaga and Cemetech). UTI would be 4th and yAronet 68k board 5th. In France, most people use 68k calcs, though. In fact, you'll notice that most TI-89 users are from France. MaxCoderz forums used to be mostly populated by dutch people. Basically, most of the french people would be from France and Belgium and dutch people from Holland and Belgium.
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Quebec is mostly french, except Montreal, which is 33% french, 33% english and 33% others. New Brunswick province is 20% french and 80% english and the rest of Canada is pretty much just english. In overall, I think only 10% of Canada speak french.
In fact, 75% of Quebec and 25% of Canada speak French. Montreal is half French, half english and others.
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Mhmm I swear I heard in history classes that MTL was like 33% others. It has an entire chineese quarter, spanish quarter and others and in some stores, it's almost impossible to have french services x.x
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Possible. I know that there is quarters that speak neither French or English and it's impossible to have french services there because immigrants will learn English instead of French.
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yeah. I think the issue is that english is spoken at so many places and easier to learn how to write than french (fewer stupid grammar rules) that people will prefer to learn english instead
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(fewer stupid grammar rules)
... b-but, I love all my grammar rules. :'(
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Lol :P
But at least english doesn't have as many exceptions of the type:
<student> teacher, why do we write this word in plural like this?
<teacher> there are no reason why, it's just like this. You just have to remember it.
than french. French is terrible for that x.x
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Mmmh... I actually think the pronounciation-spelling relation is far more complicated in English than in French. (in French, when I hear a word, I can almost always immediately spell it, and vice versa, while in English, this is way harder for me.)
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well, I often heard people having trouble learning to speak english than writing it and people having trouble writing french but speaking it easily. It might depend of location, though, due to accents.
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Yeah, I could identify myself as a grammar-nazi in French, and I hate these "kikoolol" people who makes lots of stupid typos per word. There are too much of them.
(BTW, W00T 50th post :P)
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Well personally I don't like when ppl goes too much grammar-nazi, though, I hate it since it's some form of trolling. Usually it just cause major offtopicness and debates in topics, or even scare newbies away. If they write in SMS or totally undechiperable stuff, I may tell them to rephrase in english/french, though
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I can't read French SMS-like style... This is why I don't frequent TI-Bank so often. Somehow, my Wernicke-center is more tolerant to bad spelling in English than in French :P
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Spanish seems the language with better spelling-pronunciation relation. It seems very consistent. But it is just I don't know very in depth Spanish. ;)
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Dutch is consistent as well, in theory. The regional dialects, however, are not. :P
The only thing about Dutch is the irregular stress. Even native speakers have trouble with that.
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*bump*
Are we doing this or not? I think I can convince some people to come by, so I was wondering.
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Well, given that certain of the french guys went less active (Juju2134 for example), I was not sure yet, since I was worried it would die fast, but maybe it's just because of school exams. I doN't know much how the international school systems works in terms of exams and semesters. Maybe I could start giving it a try soon?
Also be careful to who you bring here because there is one person in particular in the dutch community that, despite being a good ASM coder, gave us a bit of trouble in his very short stay on our IRC channel before, and in the past on other forums he was rather a troublesome user (major off-topicness starting and trolling). Also if you bring most of the dutch crowd in and Je Oma happens to come in, other people will have to be careful to how they talk to him over here because there are many posts on TI-Wereld that would have got them banned for rudeness over here. (I check the forums using Google translate from time to time)
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Although I personally don't speak either of these languages, I think it's a great idea. People that speak English but are not very comfortable with it would be more likely to sign up and contribute if they found out that there were forums for discussion in their native language as well. =)
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Also be careful to who you bring here because there is one person in particular in the dutch community that, despite being a good ASM coder, gave us a bit of trouble in his very short stay on our IRC channel before, and in the past on other forums he was rather a troublesome user (major off-topicness starting and trolling). Also if you bring most of the dutch crowd in and Je Oma happens to come in, other people will have to be careful to how they talk to him over here because there are many posts on TI-Wereld that would have got them banned for rudeness over here. (I check the forums using Google translate from time to time)
I know, and I've been thinking about that as well. I could of course moderate the subforum, but I might accidentally turn some people against me on TI-wereld if I'm 'too strict' (read: actually respect omnimaga rules).
And, maybe it's a better idea to wait, since the Dutch forums aren't that active either, as of now.
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oh yeah I understand that, altough personally if they do that this means they don't really respect you x.x and they only really care about themselves/want to do what they want/advocate causing fights. My main worry is JFGI/RTFM posts and post trying to discourage authors from working on their projects. Actually, this happened on UTI a year ago for a few months, with a Pokémon project, an Asteroid clone, Jsj795 RPG and some others, and notice how they either barely get any update today and that a few of them are now updated over here instead.
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Ok, so, for International sub-forums, there would be a calc help and discussion forum for both french and dutch, and an off-topic board for both too. However, I would need a good dutch translation of the following two descriptions for the dutch sub-forums:
Calculator help and discussion in dutch
-A section for general calculator help and discussion in dutch language. For game/utility showcase, please use the english projects section, though, even if it means only screenshots are posted and translator help is used.
Miscellanous discussion in dutch
-Talk about anything you want here, providing it stays within the board rules.
No section for all other languages, though, because on the old board it pretty much ended up being a spam fest and it would be very hard to moderate.
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Oh... I was looking forward to having sub-forums in dead languages like latin/sanscrit/name your favorite (I couldn't come up with others). :)
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lol,
then we should have a Bleep Bloop and 1337 one :P
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Rekenmachine help en discussie in het Nederlands
- Een sectie voor algemene rekenmachine-hulp en discussie in het Nederlands. Gebruik a.u.b. de Engelstalige 'projects section' om games of andere niewe applicaties te tonen. Ook als je dit alleen maar met behulp van een vertaler en/of screenshots kan.
Diverse discussie in het Nederlands
- Hier kan je over alles praten wat je wil, zolang het binnen de forumregels blijft.
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Thanks ^^