English only?

[colontos]

I was just noticing that a Russian language thread got closed down. The moderator said "Please post in English so that others can understand you." This seemed kind of weird, since I and probably many others could understand it (and some probably don't understand English), and he was asking a question specifically about the Russian language version of Civ 3. If Civ fanatics wants to be the best Civ 3 site on the web, isn't it a good idea to open up to other languages, at least ones that have their own versions of Civ 3?

 

[Doc Tsiolkovski]

English is simply the lingua franca of the internet age. Anybody visiting this forum can at least catch the meaning of what's said.
And, that Russian post also was in kyrillic letters, which aren't displayed on all machines (you'd need the required charset).
While I do understand a bit Russian, enough French, Italian, Dutch, and German being my native language, I thouroghly oppose any attempts to turn this into a multi-language forum.
After all, do you expect the moderators to be able to tell if something in Aramaeic isn't a flame?
Heck, even if you want to ask a specific question and do not speak English, there are enough translation tools around to get a grasp of the answer if you're Russian...

 

[Tomoyo]

Oh yeah... I was the one to respond to that Russian thread... in Russian.

There aren't too many people here that can't understand English, but there's a lot that can't understand Russian. I'm in a SG with someone to whom English is very difficult, but he can still make us understand him...

 

[Theoden]

Having too many different languages on the site would make too many 'private sections' where only some people don't even stand a chance of understanding what is said. That's why we have to choose one language and since 99.9% of the members here can understand english and and the forum wants to international english has been chosen as the only language allowed.
Also remember you are free to make PM's in any language you want.

 

[Blackbird_SR-71]

You can talk in the language you want to talk in but you have to have subtitles translating it in English for non-speakers to understand