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Language Tempest At Orkut
Quirk writes "Reuters is carrying an article outlining an ongoing headbutting session between English-speaking users of Goggle's orkut and the Portuguese-speaking users of Brazil. The orkut site has more than 769,000 members; 41.2% are Brazilians and 23.5% are Americans. The sites are now mostly in Portuguese, and English-speaking users are complaining that the service is intended to be in English. Orkut is a service meant to develop by way of invitation, and the Brazilians claim since they are inviting their Brazilian friends it doesn't make sense to communicate in English. Brazilian internet users averaged an estimated 13 hours and 51 minutes in May, eight minutes more than for Americans."
How have other major international sites dealt with the language barrier?
If you are communicating with others in your circle of friends, you should speak the same language.
If I'm in a restaurant, and the people at the table next to me are speaking Korean, it doesn't affect the conversation at my table in the slightest.
I guess we could all switch to Esperanto, the Unitarian Univeralist of languages.
Please bid on this Karmann Ghia! Please pleas
but due to the friend based invite model that this site employs, maybe the english speaking memebers of the site should start inviting more english speaking people, to equal if not overtake the brazillian tally.
Just a thought
I'm a little tea pot.
...to share and get along with others?
Don't like the foreign users? Ignore them or move on.
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
It's not like we haven't done it to everybody else.
oh, and it's not Goggle...
Why don't they just give their users the ability to filter by language? If you don't want to see the brazilian posts, you should be able to filter them out.
...it's just intended to be a service.
The English-speaking peoples of the world need to understand that outside the internet (and soon to be inside) they are a minority in the world. 1/6 of the world speaks Chinese, about the same proportion speaks Hindi, and just under that speak Spanish. While it is common to speak English, it is not the be-all-and-end-all, and people need to start accepting that.
libertarianswag.com
id say your the ignorant one, you do something (awsome) so you expect the rest of your country does the same (ouch, hit the tard line)
I was thinking of American history. In the early 20th century, there was a tremendous amount of immigration into the United States. Many people were sharply critical of this, arguing that america was by and for only Americans. The immigrants argued that it was as much their country as the native citizens.
Fast forward to 2004, Orkut, a community that was originally primarily english speaking recieves huge influx of brazilian "immagrents" The english speakers argue that their community was by and for English speakers. The brazillians argue that they were invited and that the community is now also theirs.
Notice a parallel?
Let's make a difference
"I'm an American who's tired of hearing from foreigners that one reason why Americans are not liked is because we travel abroad to other countries and EXPECT them to speak english, as if they're expected to know our language."
I'm sick of hearing this stereotype because all one has to do is look at a globe and it becomes obvious why we're not so fluent in other languages. It's not most of the USA can drive in a day and land in a country with a different national language. With the exception of Mexico (which gets so much tourism from us that English is relatively well understood) we have to hop on a plane at >$700 a ticket to visit a non-english speaking country. That's no small chore. I've been to Brazil twice, and each time it cost me $1,200 just for the ticket AND 24 hours transit time.
All it takes is a little understanding, yeesh.
"Derp de derp."
Game server != world. If the admin wants people to speak one language, he's perfectly within his rights to do so... and there are some obvious practical reasons for that policy. What's so hard to understad about that?
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
This Orcut thingy, therefore, may be good or bad, but since they are a closed (secret) society I see no way to judge it. I just walk away, not to be back any time soon.
May I ask- how do they even know there's an arguement going on? And in what language is the arguement taking place?
The reason, I would guess, that Google is interested in social network based systems is because they are looking at the Semantic Web idea (or at least some of the technologies).
FOAF is an effort by Dan Brickley/Libby Miller/Many others to create an open way to describe people - the world wide FOAF as opposed to the WWW. It shows the power of RDF in a practical (and fun!) way.
Now, Lets say I'm Google. I spend millions on maintaining my marketshare with R and D; I'm going to realise sooner or later that gossip is a powerful communication tool. Friends talk to friends. If your friend gives you something, you are far more likely to accept it. If you make it so you can only get it from your friends, its a commodity.
How do I leverage cutting edge ideas and attract users?
and *bam* there we have it.
People on orkut should be able to speak their mind, in whatever language they choose. Orkut is not just a private forum, but its also a social experiment. To be honest, I find it fascinating that a demographic war is shaping up. Who will win? ;)
I would also like to point out that orkut is unlike IRC, where perhaps it would be rude to speak a language in a channel that is prodominently another.
Flooding a channel with text that is gibberish to the majority of its recipients prevents the free flow of information, defeating communication. It is clear this is not the case with orkut.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
It's also wrong to disrespect other cultures by not even bothering to check how the names of their languages are spelt: would it really have been that hard for you to look at the spelling of Portuguese in the story summary (or even Dictionary.com) before typing your post?
This isn't a flame, it's just a heads-up that it's small things like this that make others regard Americans as arrogant.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Ya well I'm sick of hearing Americans whine about stereotypes and attempting to act hurt because 'nobody likes me.' Truth is Americans that show up somewhere, act like they're god and expect everyone to do things their way is the *norm*. If you actually make any sort of effort to learn something about the locals, you are in the minority. As such, it is to be expected that they are not going to want to have anything to do with you. Its a reputation your country earned so live with it. Your so proud to be an American, thats what you associate your self with by proclaiming it.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
You missed the point entirely. The point is that the typical American has to travel a lot further to get somewhere where his native tounge is not the most common lanaguage than a lot of other people do. I'd be fluent in other langauges too if there was more of a need. For most others, learning a second language isn't just an elective thing - it's a necessary thing.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I'm sick of hearing this stereotype because all one has to do is look at a globe and it becomes obvious why we're not so fluent in other languages. It's not most of the USA can drive in a day and land in a country with a different national language. With the exception of Mexico (which gets so much tourism from us that English is relatively well understood) we have to hop on a plane at >$700 a ticket to visit a non-english speaking country. That's no small chore. I've been to Brazil twice, and each time it cost me $1,200 just for the ticket AND 24 hours transit time.
/. ;-)
Sorry but geography is a pretty poor excuse. You could always have tried harder at school. =P
Seriously though, from my experience it is more a matter of education than geography.
Being English, English is surprisingly my first language. But I picked up much more French and German at school than I ever did in my adult life despite latterly travelling to both countries and indeed working and living in both for a time. And with a half-decent background in Latin I find most languages with their roots in Europe to be pretty easy - and that applies for countries I've never been to such as Brazil, for example. Learning something is never a handicap - not learning something is.
Personally I think it's a cultural problem faced by the U.S. as a whole. As an observer it seems to me that American schools revere sports much more than they do anything else. You need to worship jocks less and geeks more IMHO, but surely that's de rigueur here at
As far as I know, wikipedia's articles are completly seperate for diffrent languages. Most sites are single-language only.
But that could be a solution for Orkut. Just have users select a language when they sign in, and shield them from everything not in that language -- if they choose. They could also set things up so users can let the system know what languages they can speak, and if they would be interested in receiving machine translated communications.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
English is the international language. It is, by far, the most spoken second language. It is the international language of finance, bussiness, diplomacy, flight and more.
The problem is that there are just too many languages for a person to speak them all. Most people have trouble with more than 3 or 4, even if taught from birth (it gets more difficult later) and 15-20 is pretyt much the limit for even exceptional people.
Thus there is no reaonable way you can expect everyone to know Portuagese, or any other language. However you can have a reasonable expectation that most people will have at least a functional proficency in English. Thus, if you wish to communicate with a worldwide audience, English is the language you should choose.
I'm not saying people should always have to use English on the Internet, but it IS rather annoying to have people expect you should know their primary language when they want to communicate. I've had this problem in MMORPGs. People want to speak to you in French or Japanese or Korean or Spanish and so on. Problem is it is just unreasonable to ask a person to try and learn every one of the hundreds of languages on this Earth, much less the reality that most people DON'T know more than 1 or 2 languages.
However, it's a fair bet most people have at least a basic English proficiency, and thus should be the prefered choice for online discourse if you intend to reach a worldwide audience.
The rest of the world doesn't care if the average American can speak their language as well as English. What they care about is that the average American tourist visiting their country can't speak anything but English, is reluctant to even learn even two words of Mexican/French/Spanish/German/Italian/whatever, yet expects everyone else to be able to understand what they're saying to them.
You know, I didn't detect that sort of attitude from NanoGator. All he did was offer an explanation why things are the way they are - I can drive for an entire week and remain within English speaking areas - except for isolated pockets in cities, I would have to drive over 1000 miles to reach a non-English speaking area (Mexico). No wonder most people don't pick up a second/third language. I also don't know that your stereotype is accurate - it may be that you remember the obnoxious tourists, but the nice ones may have been German or something. I haven't been to europe, but when I go, I'll happily butcher 3 or 4 romance languages, then speak some passable German.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
That whatever their primary language is, it is not the primary language of most of the world. Whatever your native language is, even Chinese, there are more people in the world who that is NOT their native language.
So, this leads to a problem, how to communicate with the world. We all have different native languages. Well there has been, and is, a solution. English, while not even close to the largest primary language is by FAR the largest second language. Nearly every industralized nation, and many third world nations, teach English as well as their native tounge.
Thus English is the international language. All air traffic control is done in English (so no matter where a plane comes form or goes to the crews can communicate), Likewise bussiness is conducted in English when there is a language disparity. If a Japanese bussiness does bussiness with China, English is usually the language of exchange since Chinese is very rare in Japan, and Japanese is very rare in China.
So when one wishes to speak to an international audience, on the Internet for example, English is the best choice. Demanding that people learn your native tounge is unreasonable, as there are so very many (hundreds, if not thousands) languages out there. It is beyond the capability of any one person to learn them all. Even the most talented translators usually don't know more than 20, and they are extreme cases.
Here's one way of thinking about it. It seems the article is talking about users complaining that in a forum that started out as English, Portugese comments get posted and the language shifts to Portugese. I tried to imagine this happening on slashdot (for example, on this thread). At first I thought it wouldn't be any big deal. But then I thought, what if I was following a thread on slashdot, and suddenly it switched to Portugese. It'd be kinda like threadjacking. It's annoying to read an English thread, then someone posts a response in Portugese, because then I can no longer follow the thread. I'd like to read what that person said, but I can't. And any Portugese speaking people who were commenting would probably switch to Portugese if they posted any more comments too. Maybe I'll post something in English, and the response will be in Portugese. It really comes down to netiquette. Sure they have a right to comment however they want, it's just not polite to switch languages mid-stream. If you reverse roles (e.g. suppose I can read Portugese) and I post English comments in a thread that's all Portugese, then people start switching to posting in English, that would leave out all the Portugese-only people. Although creating a separate area may help somewhat, a better solution to the problem is just informing users how to behave better. If it was common knowledge, the community would police itself and frown upon that kind of behavior. I know polite internet conversation seems like an oxymoron to many, but for all the trolls and BS that gets posted on slashdot, it's pretty readable, and well-thought out arguments still happen.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
Why did they list *just* Americans? Why not the British and the English speaking part of Canada and others? Why turn it into America vs Brazil when it doesn't need to be?
Anecdotally, from an Asian graduate professor I had years ago, the difference in the previous emigration cultures of then (Germany, Italy, Poland ...) to the predominant ones today (Asian, Mexican) is that it was "forbidden" to speak their native tongue around children. The unspoken mandate was, for assimilation in this country, one had to lose the language and the accent. Economic survival was paramount to early immigrants, as they had no one else to lean on.
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The great majority of the americans tourists come to Brazil without knowing a single word in Portuguese, which happens to be Brazil's official and only language. (this also apply to tourists from other countries as well)
And i've never seen any brazilian complaining when a american tourist go, let's say, to a restaurant and try to speak in English with the waiter, although he's not talking brazilian official language. (and this happens a lot)
I think it's the same situation.
Oh, i also think that orkut-based spam in Portuguese sucks. But it sucks because it is spam, and not because it's not in English.
It seems they just got the internet and are acting like we did 10years ago when we first got it here, they just don't know the mannerisms of the net yet.
All this talk about which language to use seems to me to miss the point. If 40+% of a business's customer base speaks a certain language, it makes sense to me to not alienate that market segment and instead appeal to them. Imagine if McDonald's said "we are an American company and insist that everyone who comes to our restaurants speak English no matter where they are." The Internet is obviously a global market place. A company that makes their product difficult to use for their customers is missing an opportunity which another business will eventually take advantage of. Maybe even a foreign business...
that's funny. I'm in NY and all I have to do is walk 2 blocks to hear people speaking in Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Indian, Afghani, Korean, Hebrew, Arabic...
Join Team Mozilla #38050 Folding@home
This statement is incredible:
Intended by whom? Since when are discussion forums "intended" or "required" to be exclusively in English. Is enabling communication not the point of the Internet?If these were French Canadians talking about "language preservation" in Canada, most English speakers would think they were absurd. Now, when the situation is reversed, English speakers think they have the right to behave in the same absurd way.
These English speaking Orkut users are really being unfair. The fact that they cannot read Portugese is a result of the English speakers' ignorance and not the fault of the Portugese speakers. The Portugese speakers should be able to post in any language they like. If the English speakers do not like it, they can learn Portugese or use translation software to get an idea of what was said.
These English speakers had better get a clue. Online, you are exposed to the whole world, not just your boondock neighborhood. People speak lots of languages. If they choose to remain ignorant, they should not blame others for that chosen ignorance.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
It's a total non-issue and anybody who gets worked about it is - quite frankly - a complete idiot. If these people want to lock themselves out of communicating with the rest of the world, who is to say that they are not allowed to do so?
And the solution is totally simple. Orkut just needs to add a data field to users profile called "language". Every user is expected to set this field to the language his profile is written in. Also, every user gets a field to select what languages he speaks.
Then, on a search, you can choose to either get "all matches", "matches in languages I speak", or "matches in specific language X".
Problem solved, everybody will be happy.
Seems the Brazilians have a little racket for the time being but isn't it likely that things should adjust themselves as the Orkut population becomes more diverse?
All the torrents you could want.
I think that many of you are forgetting the fact that many Brazilians (probably most of them) don't master the English language well enough to write using it.
In fact many of them can hardly read/understand English. In fact, really, some can hardly write in Portuguese!
That's why I believe that this is not being done on purpose or by pride. It's just that brazilians don't feel confortable writing in English.
Of course there are some lammers thinking this issue is kind of a game to be won. But they are few (at least I hope :-).
Besides, topics in orkut tend to be informal, and when you need to say something informal, with slang, etc. it's much easier and better to use your first language.
Anyway, language is for us to understand each one better, not the opposite.
Just starting to babble in your own language to someone who may or may not speak it is the hight of impoliteness. You always ask in the local language wether someone else speaks your language or another mutual language. How am I supposed to know that your speaking god knows what or even asking me a question? You might be warning me that I am about to step into some dog shit or a nutcase.
The only exception perhaps is english in holland. You can pretty much take it for granted that nobody in the world speaks dutch and english is pretty much a second language to us. We also don't really mind, we are a small nation in a big world and either we speak english or become like the french. Easy choice eh?
Anyway this is all about speaking in the real world. Personally I think it would greatly help if people tried to speak in english on the net. Why? Esperanto or whatever is deader then dead dodo on the day of the dead. Bury it already. The net is about exchanging information easily and accross the world. Bit hard if we are going to keep up the existing language barriers. Imagine if everyone on /. posted in their local language. It would die an instant death. Most amazing are the anti-socials who go to an english forum then post a question in their own language and wonder why no-one responds.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
And never the twain shall meet, or get to know each other...
I strongly believe that a great many problems (especially wars, terrorism, etc) could be solved by people just getting to know each other better. Seeing that while yes, there are differences between them (some irreconcilable, perhaps), there are also a great many similarities; we're all human, after all.
If you can get the general population to realise that actually, there's nothing to hate or fear of people just because they're different, you'd find that the leaders have a much harder time of causing trouble. Not forgetting that tomorrow's leaders are today's Joe Bloggs - get them understanding other cultures now, you'll have less trouble if they end up in positions of power. (That works both ways, of course - each culture should understand the others)
But no, you're right - you just continue to foster your separatist attitude and separatist communities, and let other people do the hard work of trying to get people from different cultures interacting.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
You know what, the Portuguese/English language battle is just a symptom of a larger problem with Orkut. Even if you only allow friends to invite friends, some of those people are still going to be assholes who care nothing about community standards, primary languages, or the fact that nobody wants their stupid new community or look-at-my-site spam.
I am active in the big PHP community (because I love giving advice and support to PHP programmers), but this particular one is supposed to be for English speakers (there are 5 PHP-Brazil communities, and one PHP in Portuguese community as well). There are a few people who unthinkingly speak Portuguese in threads (and one "Who's from Brazil?" thread that has since gone dormant), but the one thing that eventually made my blood boil was someone who came along and double-posted spam in two new threads in Portuguese, taking up 40% of the topic real estate on the community front page. So we had a little local Brazil/English-speaking-country war over there after I railed at the bastard.
I'm subscribed to plenty of language-agnostic communities which have some threads in P-guese, but when it says on the front "Language: English" and you spout your crap in any other language, you can expect nothing but vitriol from me. I'm pretty sure I'm making enemies in Brazil as we speak. They can go to hell.
Speaking of which, even though you know the name and account number of anyone who sends you useless spam in your message box or in your communities, there's pretty much only two ways to deal with it. One is to put repeat offenders on your ignore list. The other is to make sure said person sees the following quote from the Japanese Food/Sushi Lovers community:
"Why are you doing this spam? Are you stupid or just a bad person?" --Aya Tanimura
Or just to drive the point home, here it is babelfished into Portuguese.
"Por que você está fazendo este Spam? São você stupid ou apenas uma pessoa má?"
The one extra thing you can do is identify spammers on Orkut who live near you (their names and faces are there if they're too stupid to fake them), and give them a general beatdown if you see them on the street. Maybe a tracker site would be in order: "The Hunt for Orkut Spammer"
It's funny. The people that complain the hardest seem to be Americans. Is this because they are frustrated that they don't speak a second language? The argument 'we don't need to speak a second language since our country is so big' is a rogue one. Ever been to Miami? It's easier to speak spanish there than english. Why is it, here in the Netherlands most people get at least english, and most likely a few years french and german education, yet in the USA they don't even bother to give spanish (Which would make sense) in schools as a second language (although slowly that seems to change). Because Americans have to admit they are not the best in something (languages), they try to solve it by banning it, instead of fighting the problem at the core: their own lacking. Demanding the whole world to speak english is plain ignorant.
I maintain a couple groups on Orkut, and at one point two Brazilians were speaking and commented, "I'm not sure how to express this in English." I quickly chimed in and basically said, "Then say it in Portuguese; if the content is juicy enough, the English-only speakers can paste it into Babelfish." I don't know Portuguese by the way.
There's no reason multiple languages can't coexist in one forum. I suppose others are annoyed when they're the linguistic minority for a change though. Seriously, get over it; maybe you'll actually learn something new, even if it is only a word.
I know I'm going to be flamed for this but hey, this is, as I understand it, the INTERnet, inter, as I understand it, standing more for international nowadays. Hello, xenophobic americans, there are a lot of people out there who don't - or choose not to - speak english. Get over it. I'm an english speaking Australian and I have, so what's your problem, don't you have enough international friends to get an invite??? There are deeper issues here... I am not a troll, I am simply expressing my freedom to speak (I believe you have an amendment to your constituition that covers this.)
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a thumb.
"In the early 20th century, there was a tremendous amount of immigration into the United States"
The difference of that immigration from latin immigration is that latin people keep their culture (language) toward generations.
About Orkut, I think it's indeed a "nazi" attitude to force someone to talk a language they don't know or segregate them in guetos (create a new group).
It may look easy to "talk in english" but for a non speaker it takes about 4 years to learn and anyone that speak a foreign language knows that's much easier to understand (listen/read) than to talk (speak/write), as is much harder to express yourself when you know (manage to remember) a small vocabulary.
So is not a surprise that a brazilian, when having problems expressing himself, starts talking in portuguese because he has a good chance of being understood and also can express his ideas better/faster.
Since portuguese seens to be the dominant language, even if that isn't the official one, in pratical it becames the standard one. Like native languages in many african countries and english in the internet/business/scientific.
That difficult in learning a "foreign" language is the same (or worse) for any other language except for Esperanto where you need just one year to reach the same level of understanting, because its gramatic/vocabulary were made to be easy to learn.
But the "english speakers overlords" (including those which didn't know it before but learned) don't want to abdict their status and learn another language.
Oi! Achei muito interessante a tua tese. A minha idéia era que nós brasileiros poderíamos ser por natureza muito mais sociáveis que outros povos. Aposto que isso vai gerar muito assunto para pesquisa. E infelizmente não tenho pontos para moderação. ;)
It would be "chuta os gringos de merda".
I don't know how many languages you can curse in, but from my experience Americans, French, Polish and Mexican (and mostly every other nationalyty) online players are just as annoying. I am yet to see a group of tennagers that can not be described as "Rude, arrogant, xenophobic, obnoxious", Americans most of all. I left the "racist" out because I believe it is out of place, specially for Brazilians (unless you believe "American" is a separate race - "gringo" means mostly "American" but can also be used for "foreigner").
Get real - esperanto's been indubitably dead since the '50s.
Sorry, I missed the episode when Brazil was evicted from America
MOD THE CHILD UP!