Slashdot Mirror
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."
It's interesting, Orkut seems to be mimicing "real world" human society. This fight over languages looks a lot like the conflits over immigration that happen in every country. If anything, I would take this latest conflict as proof that internet forums can function as true communities, analogous to those in the physical world. In that sense, I consider this development to be an accomplishment for Orkut.
Let's make a difference
I solved the problem by changing the communities i run to English only. While this does not enforce people to speak in english it at least informs everyone the language they should be talking in if they dont expect their post to be deleted. I guess i'm missing the breaking news behind this.
I think what would be more intresting is the rate at which amercians populated orkut vs brazilians
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
What is it with google and these services were you have to "know somebody".
Half the reason I like forums on the internet is I don't know anyone there and I don't have to.
I can pop in, post some shit, read some responses and then go back or not.
I don't want to go on the internet with people I already know from real life. I go on the internet to get away from that. Just show up, discuss something and then leave. Like a bar or something.
Brazilian internet users averaged an estimated 13 hours and 51 minutes in May, eight minutes more than for Americans.
Nice. A completely irrelevant little fact quoted at the end of the submission... equally irrelevant is this fact, actually found earlier in the article:
The United States has at least 153 million Internet users, compared with Brazil's 20 million.
But somehow, timothy decided that wasn't as significant, when in fact neither are. Typical.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
As universal languages go, lojban is much more interesting conceptually.
http://www.lojban.org/
or, if you are more visual, you might want to check out bliss-symbols.
http://notanumber.net/
I play a few online games and on one server the admin was yelling / kicking those who did not communicate in English.
It's silly. The internet is global - the first W in WWW stands for World, and the last time I checked English was not the offical language of this planet.
Those who are complaining should either mellow out or learn Portuguese.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
I have only had one experience with Brazilian people online. It seems many .br kids who like to sit in net cafes think it's funny to destroy online communities. Take, for example, the MMORPG Tibia.
These kids would walk around in-game and, upon seeing someone else, would say "br?". If you answered in English (or anything other than Portugese), they would promptly attack/gang-attack you.
Somehow, I think something similar is happening here.
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
With regards to languages in general, that is. : :
---
Let me just paste from what I dropped into IRC a while back
This is translated from a Dutch 'popular science' magazine (Kijk, for the Dutch viewers)
There are many languages in the world. Scientists estimate the number to be around 6,000.
A few languages are doing very well. Chinese is the biggest language (in terms of numbers of speakers), and will remain so for some time to come. Tamil, Bengal and Malaysian are quickly gaining ground, as is Arabic.
In contrast are languages (among which many regional African ones) of which on average one 'disappears' every day.
A surprising find is that English isn't doing very well either. it is expected that by 2050, only 5.5% of the world's population will speak the language at all.
Speakers in % of the world's population per language:
1950
English : 9%
Spanish : 5%
Hindi/Urdu : 4.5%
Arabic : 2.25%
2050
English : 5.5%
Spanish : 5.3%
Hindy/Urdu : 6%
Arabic : 5.2%
Young speakers (age 15-24) in 2050 (x 1,000,000):
Mandarin-Chinese : 166.0
Hindi/Urdu : 73.7
Arabic : 72.2
English : 65.0
Spanish : 62.8
Portuguese : 32.5
Bengal : 31.6
Russian : 14.8
Japanese : 11.3
Malaysian : 10.5
---
With regards to Orkut : As already stated.. don't bother visiting the Brazilian pages if you can't read them anyway.
Vice-versa, if the Brazilian would want English readers to read it, write in English.
---
With regards to the French : None of the doctors/nurses who helped a friend who was in a car wreck in France knew English. 'nuff said.
---
With regards to the web as whole : English rules and will rule for a long, long time to come.
Well the non-English speakers are irritating. One private messages me in broken "english" for a gmail account (why me? what an ass... anyway).
I reply to him and tell him I don't know what he said. The reply?
"That's not my problem if you don't understand, I don't know how to speak english very well, I think so...=x bye ihihihihihihh see ya"
Not your problem if I don't understand? You're asking for me to give you a present and then you flame me for not understanding your poor attempt to speak my native language? That IS your problem!
My other car is first.
Wow. You are exactly the kind of person that we're talking about here, aren't you?
If you've travelled half way around the world (or whatever distance) to another country then don't you at least owe it to yourself to absorb as much of their culture as possible? Otherwise, what's the point of having gone there if all you do is spend your time in your hotel with its English-speaking staff and cheesy tourist-oriented restaurants because you couldn't be bothered to even try to use a phrase book?
When I travel I make it a point of having a pocket dictionary and phrase book with me. For one thing, it's polite to be able to thank someone properly in their own language. For another, it's nice to be able to ask directions if you're trying to get somewhere. And, for yet another, it's nice to be able to do more than shout English at someone very slowly if you're caught up in an emergency of some sort.
I speak English and four other languages (two very well, two pretty well) yet I'm constantly amazed by fellow tourists overseas who can't even say "hello", "please" or "thank you" even after two weeks. You're a guest in someone else's country, is it so damned hard to actually learn a word or two of their language when you expect everyone else to be fluent in yours?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
We had our fair share of knee-jerk reactions from a lot of people. Some Americans felt (really!) threatened by the fact a non-English speaking country dominated Orkut's stats overnight, and voiced out their frustration in a very vocal manner. Some Brazilians felt outraged and started an equally stupid reaction, flooding English-speaking communities with messages in Portuguese. Perhaps it has happened otherwise, I'm not sure.
This could be discussed in a more civilized, intelligent way, but (as often happens also in Slashdot) well-thought and valuable opinions are just lost in the noise. Nobody respects anybody, that's what we can get from all this.
I think it's a shame that a service like this, which can be used to connect people from every corner of the planet, isn't better used. Personally, I'll still try to do the best use I can. Orkut already helped me to find some (long lost) old friends and I'm happy I could find them. ^^
My neighbor's
Once the Brazilians figure out how lame and useless these social networking things are, their numbers will drop.
Unless you have a majority of the visitors / participants that are multilingual capable, you have to separate the content of a web site by language.
I say this from experience on several newsgroups, then forums over the years.
It starts out simple: people who are early adopters often speak English, and can read English (e.g. programmers, ...etc. who know English anyway). Then as technology spreads among the less techno-elite, people who do not know English well want to express themselves in their native language.
In languages that use a non Latin character set, there is a phase where internet communication uses Latin characters to represent their own language. I have seen at least Hindi and Arabic written in Latin alphabet, with some modifiers. (Even some Euro languages lost some characters, like Scandinavian and Germanic languages, where the "O" in Torvalds lacks the stroke in the middle, and the "A" with the small circle, ..etc.)
There are various "dialects" used in these Latinized alphabets, and people learn one version or the other depending on where they learn it first.
This becomes a transitionary phase on these forums, where people will express themselves using this Latin based alphabet to represent their own language.
Then later, as their own language becomes more wide spread and accepted, more people get to use computers and the internet, and they perhaps do not know any language other than their own. This leads to them demanding that only their native language be used in forums that are about their country/society/language/...etc.
Anyone who speaks a "foreign" language in those forums is reminded that the primary language is such and such, and not to confuse others. Some take this as a matter of national pride, some take it as mere courtsey, others take it as common sense, and yet others take it as a mere form of communication. Depends on who you are, your outlook, and your biases.
That is what I have seen in several newsgroups/forums over the years.
So, this is the phase that Orkut is at right now.
Eventually, they may have to separate the content by language. Although there are barriers here, because Orkut is about "networking", and not just "discussions".
It would be interesting to see how this turf war gets resolved eventually, at least for those who are like me who like to observe the new frontiers that the internet have defined/merged/melted/setup.
P.S. In Canada for example, where there are two large groups speaking two languages, a majority of web sites give the option on what language to use at the very beginning. Forums are separated into two languages on many sites. There is a minority who are bilingual and can (and do) participate in the two camps. I imagine Hispanics in the USA, and Spanish speaking Anglos do the same on some forums.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Reading this article about Orkut being so popular in Brazil, I decided to take a chance on finding a friend I had known for a couple years, but lost contact with after he moved to Brazil. I plugged in his name and *BAM* I see his profile and his picture. :-)
I sent him a message - hopefully he remembers me and responds. I just thought it was sort of cool to re-find him that way
And you're assuming that everyone who uses the net is using it for international communications. Many people could care less about people in other countries, and use the net for a plethora of non-international reasons. There's no reason for a Brazilian to use a non-native language which is the norm for international communications to talk with another Brazilian across town.
The Iranians also; they seem to have hundreds of people on their friend lists and I keep getting mails sent to "friends of friends" that I can't read :-p
For the most part, though, they speak English.
Twenties Retirement
then post here. Either I, or someone else, will be likely to come along and drop you one.
;-))
(I'm not implying you want to join, of course
With gmail, I think it was
1) an attempt to prevent the service from growing to fast. Most websites grow slowly, and that can help them fix problems. But with Gmail, everyone was going to get an account as soon as possible. So the invite system helped them moderate growth. Somewhat.
2) It made a gmail account something precious. And made people want it. It was good marketing.
I actualy got invited to orkut (intrestingly by my autopr0n.com usernmae, rather then my real name). It was pretty annoying, and I gave up on it quickly.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Of course they could come to an agreement with Alta-Vista, or some other company, and perhaps provide a link on every posting to view the posting in some other language, via BabbleFish.
Not being an Orkut user, it doesn't really matter to me however. I think it would be great if google would post a confirmation request as part of the user submitting the posting in Portugese, or Big5, that states in 'English' something along the lines of:
Your posting appears to be in Launguage Below the preview of your posting, is a BabbleFish translation of your posting in English. As the creator of the group you are posting to has indicated that English is the prefered language for the group, the BabbleFish translation is what will appear. If you wrote this in a language other than Language please select the correct language for your source post, so we can show you what may be a more accurate translation of your posting. The Moderator has indicated that if someone posts to this group in a language other than english, or includes profanity in the post, that post is subject to being deleated.
Likewise for other languages as identified relavent to the group being posted to, and it's language preferences.
For groups where 'any' language may be appropriate, a request to identify what language the user is posting in (defaulting to the language preference of the user) and a warning that the translation to other languages may not be completely accurate, would probably suffice.
Then again, if I just stir up the coals a little bit more, perhaps I will get more people fighting. Ah well, crazy talk.
-Rusty
You never know...
Orkut doesn't support international character encoding, so if you and your friends speak a language that doesnt use the Roman alphabet (Japanese or Chinese, for example), then you're just screwed.
It's crazy seeing all these Japanese Orkut users (there are quite a few) posting to each other in romaji and broken English.
Acredito que se trata de uma tendência absolutamente natural na evolção de qualquer rede social. O fato dos brasileiros terem tomado o lugar dos alemães ou indianos, foi parte por timing, parte por coincidência. Como um outro comentário mencionou, muitos norte-americanos acabaram ignorando convites para o Orkut por causa da febre do Friendster que já tinha passado por eles, enquanto essa febre jamais chegou aqui no Brasil.
(espero que tenha bastante brasileiro por aí com pontos para moderar. abraço.)
-mz
Realizing that wasn't going to satisfy you cynical bastards, I kept looking and:
Courtesy of the BBC -- "British 'world's worst tourists'"
As I'd recollected: Germans the favorite, followed by American, Japanese and Italians.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
let me guess, you went to Barcelona, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen and the like (eg, the capitals of western Europe). As a European citizen, I'll paint you another picture: south of France, countryside in Spain, Italy (you don't have to go to the countryside there), countryside in Denmark, Switserland. when you leave Western and Southern Europe behind, and head to Eastern Europe, the knowledge of English is even less! (I only have experciences of Romania, Hungary and Czech Republic) I've been to all of these countries, and in each I've had problems using English, in some I've even had problems using anything but their own language.
pictures and ramblings
Hey, sounds just like Americans in a non-English language usenet group - without the bitching about the stupid language people keep using.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Don't get me wrong - I have nothing against brazil or its people (the women are especially beautiful), but besides Orkut, theres many other community-esque websites which brazilians tends to invade, in a sense, and attempt to assimilate into their own.
Fotolog.net comes to mind. Originally a website by a handful of new yorkers to be a photo-blog type site, it has exploded with brazilians, mainly teenagers. Its not so much a blog to them, as the vast majority of pictures are crude webcam type self portraits or risque photos they upload, as opposed to the original amateur photographer type envisioned when it was started.
Most words posted on fotolog are written in portuguese. Its a common point of tension among these users and the administrators. Fotolog is hosted in america and its administrators are mostly americans. Therefore, the membership plans which pay for the site and its bandwidth are in american dollars ($5 atm). $5 is alot of money for the average brazilian, and since stolen credit card numbers and fraud is utterly rampant in Brazil, it is very difficult for the brazilian users to become legitimate paying members, and enjoy the benefits thereof.
But what is it about brazil that they tend to 'invade' sites that are clearly not meant to cater to their individual needs, involving language and culture? Why are they not starting their own Orkut, or their own Fotolog, instead choosing to invade an existing site and demanding its administrators cater to them? How can this be remedied?
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Given that caveat, I would say that more people on Earth speak English than any other language. If the goal of the site is to create the largest international audience possible and help them to converse with each other, then English is the best choice.
And before you start claiming this is American imperialism (of which there is plenty already), you can thank the good ol' English from England for it. :)
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
from FYI's Blog [ fyiblog.blogspot.com ], translation by me:
-----------
"The Brazilians in Orkut"
For some reason I still do not grasp entirely, Orkut became a craze in Brazil. Nothing against the site, I also am a member, but suddenly everyone is talking about it. It became so pop, even Veja [Brazil's most important magazine] published an article about it.
Thus far, that's ok. However, most of these people have not joined it to know people, or to take part in the discussion groups. They are only going to make a ruckus out of it.
Dont ask me how this nonsense began exactelly, but all of a sudden I started getting emails inviting me to "join the brazilian movement in Orkut". It seems the idea was that we should invite other brazilians to enter in the site, to make the number of brazilians bigger than that of Americans.
For what, you ask? Ah! It seems that someone named Gary, supposedly an american, somehow insulted the brazilians there. He said that we were a bunch of dicks who start speaking portuguese in american groups, something like that.
And to prove that we are not ignorant indians, but educated and intelligent people, which better reply of the one than... to beat the USA in sheer statistics?
The Saga continues, and it seems that Gary person was banished. However, "Gary's followers" started showing up.
One of the countless messages I received came from one of these followers. I found interesting as the such individual had a nazi-styled photo, and had poor english. Tracking his messages, I found he spoke portuguese! It seems he had studied in Brazil (huh?), therefore things were like that.
But that was just the beginning! Now, whenever I log in, I receive dozens of messages telling me I should change my photo to a flag of Brazil in the september 7th [brazilian independence day], or that I should change my photo to a flag of Iraq (?), or change my photo to a pic of the twin towers in the 4th of july!
Seriously, why is our concentration of stupidity so high? I check the profiles of the senders of those childish messages expecting to find 15-year-old brats, and find 30-year-olds.
Why can people from Iran, Japan, Slovenia, India, etc, keep civil, while we get in this nonsense? Ah, this bloated ego of ours... or, more precisely, our inferiority complex.
And again, the joke is on us.
-----------
Circumcision is child abuse.
Oh I don't like french, filter french people. I don't like americans, filter americans.
Humans are talkers and we need to talk, there is just one hurdle remaining and that is a common language (love is but aids is killing that one plus gf tends to be rather unsupporting of me going talking to that blonde with the intrestting tits^H^H^H^H^Hdialect).
English is of course acceptable to everyone who speaks it but to those who don't it is a difficult one to pick up, and human beings being the selfish assholes they are, and they would prefer the english speakers to learn their language.
The truly insane want everyone to learn esperanto. A language nobody finds easy and no established base.
Personally I am dutch so english is the natural choice for me. (dutch is far far to difficult for the foreigners to learn without very good training, it can be done but you need an expensive course)
What I am wondering is if brazillians learn english as a second language like we do in holland and are just either poor students or incredible assholes (speaking english to an american isn't kow-towing, it is showing you are a smarter, a truly cultured person doesn't limit himself to one language). Oh well people being anti-social on the net, what a suprise eh?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
machine translated communications.
I just had a thought. Lets assume that over the next couple of years machine translation becomes routine in all areas of the internet, and that the internet continues to expand across the globe and into homes and schools. No matter what language you speak, most people speak a different language. Machine translated language could quickly become a substantial fraction of all text anyone reads. In effect machine translation could become the single biggest "language" on the internet, or even in the world. What other sorts of influence could it have?
Wouldn't it tend to affect and influence those millions of people? What sort of feedback effect could it have on the evolution of spoken languages? Would machinetranslation-isms and machine style begin begin to infect spoken language? Would languages tend evolve to be more easily machine translatable?
The effect would become particularly pronounced as internet access spreads into primary schools and children are exposed to substantial amounts of machine translation while their language skills are still in the formative stages.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
A quick search for females on Orkut yielded the following results.
female, 20, single
Brazil
female, 18, single
Brazil
female, 22, single
Brazil
female, 25, single
Brazil
female, 28, single
Brazil
female, 22, single
Brazil
And most of the pictures are rather... nice. I dunno about you guys, but I'm going to go learn some Brazilian now!
The most interesing line in the entire article " Iranians are a distant third place at about 6 percent", and no one even seems to notice?
Iran number 3 on Orkut! Hello! THAT is the story I wanna read!
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
No. Care had an older meaning in English. The phrase "I don't care to" currently means that one does not want to do it, but originally meant that one did not care (have a concern about) about doing it.
"Would you bring ice cream to the picnic?"
"I don't care to." - (I don't mind)
It's still used that way in parts of the midwest US.
However, English is slowly on the way out. This is nothing new, it has occupied a place taken by Greek, Latin, classical Arabic, French in different areas of the world and times of history. Simply, on a global scale.
The choice of international language is mostly due to social dynamics, and the rise of China as an economic power is going to have consequences. Either they learn English, or we learn Chinese (besides I've been told that some parts of Chinese are quite easy - not the writing of course...). Spanish is becoming more and more widespread in the US; who knows, in a few generations there won't be any USofA, there will be EUdeA (Estados Unidos de América).
As one living in a country different from my native one, I can say that most people in large countries don't really speak English - they merely improvise. They can order a coffee, but cannot withstand a real conversation, not with ease. It might be enough to survive, but not to say that "you speak the language".
Me, I still wait for the day someone finally realises that languages are tools as hammers and printers, and takes a rational perspective at it. Esperanto is indeed better fit as an international language than any ethnic language, not because of any superior mind behind it, just because it's engineered to be easy. However, given the current situation, it's easier for each one to learn English than convincing the world to use Esperanto.
But again, as G.B. Shaw put it,
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
I am on Orkut, and I don't care if members there speak Portuguese, English, Korean or Swahili. I speak several languages, and I don't believe everyone in the world needs to speak English.
What I do care about is the fact that every day my Orkut mailbox is filled with mass-mailed messages addressed to "Communities" and "Friends of friends" which are written in Portuguese, and therefore of no interest to me. More than half the messages in my box fit this description now. I find it extremely irritating; it's a step away from spam.
What Orkut needs is:
This would solve the problem, and, I imagine, greatly reduce bandwidth (or, rather, increase useful bandwidth) since it can be done server-side.
BH
Fools! They laughed at me at the Sorbonne...!
The first "universal" language was LATIN, used by scholars among the catholic churc in the Medieval Ages. Reading the old classics of Plato, Homer, Archimedes, Herodoto and others...
Then french rose as the prefered language. France was the great continnental potence until the end of the 18th century.
When England started the Industrial Revolution, english slowly began to predominate...
As you can see... It's a normal thing, I'm not sayng that portuguese will become the official language of the internet... but it may well become the predominate language of Orkut, and that's not a bad thing.
THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS AN OFFICIAL INTERNET LANGUAGE
There are people in Brasil, and in other countries, that can't afford english classes... bu t somehow they've managed to get access to the internet. These people don't have the right to use internet in their own language!?!
See... if the English-speaking users want to speak in english, then do so! Let the french speak french, and the brazilians speak portuguese, and the spannish speak spannish!
This Orkut thing is a good chance to show how opressive the USA can be, tryng to force their culture to other people. Nobody is obligated to learn english!
Internet is a wonderfull example of democracy... lets try to keep things this way.
(by the way, sorry my english... see, I'm another internet-crazed-brazilian)
Problem solved.
They're always looking to find new services to extend their Google Portfolio, and this would be a worthwhile one.
For posts in English, to Brazilian readers, it would simply translate that way as well..
Why should english be primary language for international sites?
Only relatively small group of people use English as native language.
While it is true that there are only around 400 million native speakers of english in the world, there are also between 0.5 and 1.0 billion people who have been schooled in english as a second language.[1] There is probably an equal number of people who know english well enough for commerce and technical communications.
A very interesting thing is that there are at least twice as many people who are fluent in english as a second language as there are native speakers of english. I think that is very rare for a living language; I'm not sure it has ever happened before.
The way english is evolving is now more influenced by people who use it as a second language than it is by native speakers. The rate at which new words and expressions are coming into the language has never been higher; there is also a rapid acceptance of new alternate syntaxes, grammars, and spelling that I think is very unusual.
I for one welcome the new expressions our Brazilian internet users could bring to english (if they choose to mingle with the rest of the world).
[1]Start with Wikipedia's article and work your way through the links...
If I go to "www.Google.cm", becasue I'm in Hong Kong I'm immediately bounced to "www.google.com.hk", which is in Chinese by default. You may gather that I'm not Chinese, speak little and read less. Even if I go to the English version of this site, I rarely want to find Hong Kong sites at the top of the list (and when I do, I know how to do that). Another site that used to guess my language preferences from my IP was Distrowatch that also gave me a Chinese version of their site, with no way to change to English (Language selection reverted after selection)-- this bug has apparently been fixed, just checked it while getting the URL and saw English there for the first time.