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."
SAO PAULO, Brazil (Reuters) - Brazil has butted heads with the United States this year on issues ranging from cotton subsidies to the war in Iraq .
But perhaps none of the battles has been so personal as the one being fought on the Internet.
Thousands of Brazilians have become devotees of Orkut (http://www.orkut.com), a popular new social-networking site from Web search leader Google Inc.
Orkut allows members to organize themselves into online communities of friends, and friends of friends, to discuss everything from chess to sandwiches.
But the rush of Brazilians to join Orkut and rival social networking sites has upset some online users, who complain of a proliferation of messages posted in Portuguese, Brazil's native tongue.
Some users have even started communities specifically for people to air their gripes on this issue.
The United States has at least 153 million Internet users, compared with Brazil's 20 million. Still, Orkut said Brazilians dominated its membership roster in June, outnumbering Americans for the first time.
The site says it has more than 769,000 members, making it one of the largest and most popular of its type on the Internet. About 23.5 percent of the users are from the United States, while another 41.2 percent are Brazilians.
Iranians are a distant third place at about 6 percent.
SELECTIVE MEMBERSHIP
Orkut, named after Google software engineer Orkut Buyukkokten, made its debut in January and is still in the testing stages. Part of its allure is its exclusivity -- one can only join at the invitation of another member.
"Orkut maps one's social prestige, and Brazilians are by nature gregarious," said Beth Saad, a professor at the University of Sao Paulo's School of Communications and Arts.
Although more than one-fourth of Brazilians live in poverty, those who can afford Internet access have become avid Web surfers.
In terms of time spent on the Internet, Brazilians edged out the United States in May for the second month in a row, according to Ibope/NetRatings. The market researcher estimates that Internet use for Brazilians averaged 13 hours and 51 minutes in May, eight minutes more than for Americans.
The number of Brazilian visitors to community sites and online diaries rose 14.6 percent to 3.5 million in May from January, Ibope/NetRatings said.
Tammy Soldaat, a Canadian, got a sample of Brazilian wrath recently when she posted a message asking whether her community site on body piercing should be exclusive to people who speak English.
Brazilian Orkut users quickly labeled her a "nazi" and "xenophobe."
"After that I understood why everyone is complaining about these people, why they're being called the 'plague of Orkut,"' she said in a site called "Crazy Brazilian Invasion."
John Gibbs of Mountain View, California, has founded a community called "So many Brazilians on Orkut."
"When the average Orkut user goes to look at community listings to see what's out there, he'll see a list populated with pretty much all Portuguese communities," Gibbs said. "This is highly frustrating since Orkut is not a Brazilian service."
But Mateus Reis, a publicist who lives in Sao Paulo, said users should be free to write what they want, in the language of their choosing.
"Since we can invite anyone we want at Orkut, and my friends are Brazilians, it doesn't make sense talking to them in English," Reis said in Portuguese. "I use the language I know."
His compatriot Pablo Miyazawa has a more moderate view.
"Brazilians have the right to create anything they want in any language they want," Miyazawa said. "The problem is to invade forums with specific languages and write in Portuguese. Brazilians are still learning how to behave in the Net."
AN INTERNET FORCE
The Brazilians' ardor for the Internet extends to other community-based sites, and Web ent
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
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
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...
O SAO PAULO, Brasil (Reuters) - Brasil butted as cabeças com os estados unidos este ano nas edições que variam dos subsídios do algodão à guerra em Iraq. Mas talvez nenhuma das batalhas foi assim que pessoal como essa que está sendo lutado no Internet. Os milhares dos brasileiros têm os devotoes tornados de Orkut (http://www.orkut.com), um local novo popular do social-social-networking do líder Google Inc da busca da correia fotorreceptora. Orkut permite que os membros organizem-se em comunidades em linha dos amigos, e dos amigos dos amigos, para discutir tudo do chess aos sanduíches. Mas as arremetidas dos brasileiros para juntar Orkut e locais sociais do networking do rival viraram alguns usuários em linha, que se queixam de um proliferation das mensagens afixadas no português, lingüeta nativa de Brazil's. Alguns usuários começaram mesmo comunidades especificamente para que os povos arejem seus gripes nesta edição. Os estados unidos têm ao menos 153 milhão usuários do Internet, comparados com o Brazil's 20 milhões. Ainda, os brasileiros ditos Orkut dominaram seu roster da sociedade em junho, outnumbering americanos para a primeira vez. O local diz que tem mais de 769.000 membros, fazendo lhe um do maior e mais popular de seu tipo no Internet. Aproximadamente 23.5 por cento dos usuários são dos estados unidos, quando outros 41.2 por cento forem brasileiros. Iranians são um terceiro lugar distante em aproximadamente 6 por cento.
SOCIEDADE SELETIVA Orkut, nomeado após a Software Engineer Orkut de Google Buyukkokten, feito seu debut em janeiro e está ainda nos estágios testando. A parte de seu fascínio é seu exclusivity -- um pode somente juntar no invitation de um outro membro. o "Orkut traça o prestige social de one's, e os brasileiros são pela natureza gregarious, " Beth dito Saad, um professor na universidade da escola do sao Paulo's das comunicações e de artes. Embora mais de um quarto dos brasileiros vivam na pobreza, aqueles que podem ter recursos para o acesso do Internet têm surfers de correia fotorreceptora avid tornados. Nos termos do tempo gastados no Internet, os brasileiros afiaram para fora dos estados unidos em maio para o segundo mês em uma fileira, de acordo com Ibope/NetRatings. O investigador de mercado estima que o uso do Internet para brasileiros calculou a média de 13 horas e de 51 minutos em maio, oito minutos mais do que para americanos. O número de visitantes brazilian aos locais da comunidade e aos diários em linha levantou-se 14.6 por cento a 3.5 milhões em maio de janeiro, Ibope/NetRatings dito. Tammy Soldaat, um canadense, começou uma amostra do wrath brazilian recentemente quando afixou uma mensagem que pergunta se seu local da comunidade na perfuração do corpo deve ser exclusivo povoar quem falam o inglês. Os usuários brazilian de Orkut etiquetaram-na rapidamente um "nazi" e "xenophobe." "After que eu compreendi porque todos se está queixando sobre estes povos, porque they're que está sendo chamado o 'plague de Orkut, "' disse em um local chamado o brasileiro "Crazy Invasion." John Gibbs do Mountain View, Califórnia, fundou uma comunidade chamada o "So muitos brasileiros em Orkut." "When o usuário de Orkut da média vai olhar listas da comunidade para ver para fora what's lá, he'll vêem uma lista povoada com muito bonito todas as comunidades portuguese, " Gibbs dito. os "This estão frustrando altamente desde que Orkut não é um service." brazilian; Mas Mateus Reis, um publicist que viva no sao Paulo, os usuários ditos deve estar livre escrever o que querem, na língua de seu escolher. "Since nós podemos convidar qualquer um que nós queremos em Orkut, e meus amigos são brasileiros, ele doesn't fazem o sentido falando a eles em inglês, " Reis d
Fer fsck's sake, I wish the Slashdot editors would do something about the atrocious spelling of some of their contributors. What the heck is "Goggle"?
Sounds like it would be a good idea to open it publicly then, it would be a shame to see it fade into obscurity just because most of the world cant understand most of the communications....Naw, that could never happen, i mean its google right?
...Finnish?
Find free books.
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.
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.
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 a firm believer of "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" and when I visit abroad I try to speak as much of that nation's language as possible and keep a dictionary handy. I wonder if this is just another show of our much detested arrogance...
If the Brazilians find it useful, then by all means, use the site in Brazilian.
The AIX group was lame, the vi group had 1 conversation a millenia ago, and by the time I finished typing a long winded discourse on my favorite drummer Orkut logged me out. For all its warts, I'm sticking to Slashdot. Everyone else can have orkut.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
...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
"OK, I onlee kno teh english lang and i wanto no wh4t teh 0thre d00ds r saying!!!!! they sux00r! b1gt1meeee! WTF? OMG? cant tey keep thos guyzz 0ff teh inetrn3t? OMG. OMG." bleh. carl
13 hours and 51 minutes per.... day, week, month year? We need units here people!
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 think this guy has the point: we don't speak english anyway.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Surely Google can address issue with technology. Their search interfaces have options to restrict results by language and nationality; can't orkut do the same?
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Ok, I've got a gmail account, but I've yet to meet anyone with an Orkut account at all.
Are these things real? I think you are all playing some kind of huge joke on me. Prove me wrong. Invite me. cavio@hotmail.com
Please bid on this Karmann Ghia! Please pleas
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?
If there are more people speaking one language in some place it's just normal that it become the de facto language. Most speak portuguese then portuguese it is, second to most is english then english should be considered the second language of choice. Democracy, majority rules, isn't that what americans promote?
>"Who gives a shit?"
>The english speaking people trying to use the >site? RTFA.
um, that's who we're talking about- who gives a shit? they can't read the language, they should learn it, ask for help, use another circle-jerk service or stop complaining.
they need a hobby, a life, or a brasilian girlfriend. Or Something.
carl
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.
Uhoh, here comes the neighborhood!
It's wrong to invade a conversation by using another language, or noise type posts. But the internet is about everyone, so other then being rude, just have seperate forums for "English" "Portulgiese"(sp?), etc. I think there's enough room for everyone on the net.
I also think people have the right to have "english only" sections, "Spanish only" web sites, so on. Mainly on orkut, after all, it's about inviting friends...
Be seeing you...
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.
Diversity is the opposite of excellence.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Multi-culturalism is okay? Even here in the USA? Guess it was a little hard to tell what with all of the blacks, hispanics, asians, arabs, and other nationalities running around. We have no problem with multi-culturalism. But that isn't even what this issue is about...
The Americans aren't demanding that everyone speak *American English*. They are simply wanting people to speak *English* The language wasn't invented by nor is it owned by the Americans. Is their demand wrong? I don't think so being that a good amount of the entire *worlds* communication happens in English every day AND seeing that the company that owns Orkut is an *American* company.
Need a great Linux laption? Email me for details!
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
Check out my own network, brazillian friendly!
You speak English and I'll get one of those waxings your people are famous for.
The site should use it's memeber mass to make articles in both languages! How hard could it be? It's surely profitable!
...between English-speaking users of Goggle's orkut and the Portuguese-speaking users of Brazil...
Would it be offtopic to say I just bought a nice pair of novelty Beer Googles from the novelty shop yesterday?
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
May I ask- how do they even know there's an arguement going on? And in what language is the arguement taking place?
Klingon? mubelmoH Holraj *rgh* wab.
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.
Apparently you completely missed the point.
The fact that Americans "are simply wanting [sic] people to speak *English*" is the problem. Having a bunch of different cultures "running around" in one country isn't multiculturalism; having a diverse set of cultures co-existing in a climate of mutual respect and operating under the assumption that it's OK to speak different languages, have different religions, or eat different foods, on the other hand, is.
To use your own argument against you, a good amount of the world's communication may happen in English... but a greater amount is happening in Portugese, or this wouldn't even be an issue. Orkut may be an American company, but I don't see anywhere on their site that you are required, or even encouraged, to write in English.
The world-wide-web is global. Get used to it.
I don't see how this is a solution, except for your communities. After all, if the Brazilians all do this, then you've got the exact same problem.
And the l33t shall inherit the 34r7h.
Wow, I didn't realise that members of the KKK were smart enough to figure out this intarweb thing.
I see this modded troll for the tone.
..."
... work on my site ?" ... ?"
However, I agree. The whole argument over the languages is just dumb. If you only speak/read/type one language then, just read/write post in it and ignore the others.
It doesn't matter what language "the service" is in if people can add content. If you can't read their content then, it obviously wasn't meant for you; regardless of your language.
On the other hand, this is the same 'ol Brazil bashing (not completely undeserved) that we've seen before.
Developers/Programmers/Hackers, how many times have you seen:
"I'm from Brazil, I don't want to learn to program but, how can I
"... be a hacker ?"
"... make this javascript I copied from
"... make a program that does
.
.
.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
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
Repeat after me....
"I am an Individual"
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
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
What the heck does orkut means? Is it an english word? Why the heck is it clear that we have to speak english on it?
Let's all speak Elvish
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
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.
hehe, rated insightfull
American Orkut users definitely have a right to complain about the brazilians, not because of portuguese replacing english, but because of the behavior of most brazilians. When asked politely to speak in a language in wich more people would understand them, most of them answer with stuff like: "fuck J00 you american imperialsit pig!" "fuck J00 , Fuck Bush" That's simply moronic, but unfortunately seems to be the way most of my people think(I'm brazilian).
I'm Korean-American. I doubt I'd be welcome at a Klan rally. And your arguing style - tar your opponent with invective and name-calling rather than address his ideas - is much more the Klan's style than mine. How's that feel?
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
I find it a bit funny that you prefaced that statement "Multi-culturalism is ok" with "Repeat after me." It seems that a lot of people have convinced themselves of the validty of this statement without giving it much thought. Repeat after me: "We are all individuals."
Do you believe standards are bad? Do you think a million different "standards" should exist merely for the sake of diversity? For humanity to be productive, we have to standardize on a language we all understand, be it English, Portugese, or Esperanto. Besides, the idea that language is tied to culture is nothing more than moronic. Yes, fractured languages "preserve" cultures in the sense that they prevent people of different cultures from sharing aspects of their cultures and integrating aspects of other cultures more easily into their own. In other words, fractured languages create artificial barriers among people preventing the natural mixing of cultures that would normally occur. Personally, English is my third language, and I am more than happy to speak and write it (I also had to learn French as my fourth in order to appease those bloody Quebecers).
Now that that is out of the way, we come the the subject of culture itself. Multiculturalism shouldn't be about artificially creating a thousand small cultures; it should be about merging the best elements of cultures.
Finally, I'd like to address the often mentioned concept that "all cultures are equal." The moment you accept that "Nazis are evil" you accept that all cultures are in fact not equal. I'm certainly not saying that American culture is the ueber-Culture which should assimilate all others (I'm not even an American), not am I implying that American culture is the best culture by any means. I merely wish that we would put all this politically correct garbage behind us and examine the situation instead of ignoring everything around us and repeating to ourselves that "Multi-culturalism is ok."
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
about the same proportion speaks Hindi
:)
If your talking about India, then I think your wrong about Hindi. From the CIA factbook:
English enjoys associate status but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication; Hindi is the national language and primary tongue of 30% of the people; there are 14 other official languages: Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Sanskrit; Hindustani is a popular variant of Hindi/Urdu spoken widely throughout northern India but is not an official language
30% of a billion is ~300 million or less than the population of the US. Nothing to sneeze at but not 1/6.
In talking with an Indian coworkers, one of the things that struck me was how little of their native languages they knew or remembered. In particular, one guy brought out his passport. It had two languages, an Indian one and English. He could only understand one of them---Engish. He laughed about it, but I felt very "culturally imperialist" when he pointed it out.
IMHO, one of the reasons that India has been so successful in outsoucing is that so many people know English. There is much less of a language barrier in communicating designs or requirements.
Brian Ellenberger
I first scanned that as "13 hours and 51 minutes a day" and I was like "nah, I don't think I use it for much more than 12 hours."
Gotta take my eyes away from the screen for a bit...
I've been very frustrated with a large and obnoxious group of people who refuse to be polite regarding language choice. 90% of the spam I get on Orkut is in Portuguese, usually having nothing to do with the designated English community they are spamming. Many people refuse to follow the designated language of communities and get angry when asked to translate. Replies like this are more than common; this was directed to me July 12th: "please babe, don't bother... As you can see you're the only gringa here... So keep quiet. We're still speaking in portuguese here! Not happy?! go learn it, as I learnt English" It's not a matter of being able to ignore non-English speakers, it's about people being rude to one another.
A good way to threaten somebody is to light a stick of dynamite. Then you call the guy and hold the burning fuse up to t
-PS
"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
How many bills have appeared in the United States that have attempted to control Internet content outside of existing laws? How many have passed into law? How many have quietly dissolved due to impracticality? ("What do you mean we can't shut down foreign websites if we don't like their views -this is America!") We, as a people, are acting a bit like a bully that has met someone that...isn't afraid of us and won't simply bend to our will. We're not sure what to do, but like any spoiled brat, the first thing we'll do is get angry. After that, we'll try something less noticeable, like ignoring it. Someday, maybe, we just might learn to get along, be part of a larger community and enjoy life.
Short term solution? Filters should be made available so that the end user can choose to ignore any information that is deemed "noise". It won't help our attitude, but it will make the service more useful to everyone.
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
56 (527333) writes: > 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.
:-)
This would work great, and they might add it. They should also think about separating Orkut into two distinct regions; Brazil, and everwhere else. Clearly Brazil has earned their own version of Orkut.
Furthermore, I think it's cool your name is my UID.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I don't see any reason why they should expect people to speak English on the site in general. I guess I could see why they would complain if they created a community and then everyone spoke a different language in it. I guess I'd expect that if I went into a community founded by someone English speaking that the communication there would be in english and if I went into one founded by a Brazilian then the language would be Portuguese (unless the Brazilian liked some other language). Anyways I guess my point is if you created the community to be a circle of English speaking friends then you have some right to be upset if a bunch of people come in and speak a different language and leave your out of your own community but if you are complaining because there are other communities that speak other languages then you need to go sit on your thumb.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
While, granted, it may not work very well for slang/etc, why not have like some sort of translation. Like each person chooses there language, and when you view a thread/message/whatever the hell Orkut has, it translates it looks to see if the posters language is different than yours, and if so, translates it to your language. Google does innovative things, just look at Gmail, why not do something like this(AFAIK I haven't seen anything that does this automatically).
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
t without giving it much thought.
I have given it much thought. I've lived and worked in enough countries: Canada, The United States, Mexico, Japan. I've travelled to more than 20 countries. I speak English and French fluently, Spanish and Japanese converstationally, enough Slovak and Ukrainian to get by and even the Yucatec dialect of Maya.
I believe that diversity in language and culture is a good thing. First of all, travelling to other countries and learning other languages exposes to ideas that might contradict conventional wisdom in our own culture. Language and culture are often intimitely tied together, such that even learning a languages challeges some of our preconceived ways of thinking.
I am not a "bloody Quebecker" (I'm from BC) but I've visited Quebec quite a few times, and loved it every time I was there. Are there cultural differences? Yes. Are there linguistic differences? Yes. Are there cultural differences in the legal system? Yes. Are there political differences? Ben oui! And vive la différence man! Plus Quebecoise girls are intrinsically hot.
Actually I do believe that all cultures are equal in the sense that it makes no sense to rank cultures. When you say culture A is "better" than culture B, what metric are you applying? The Nazis were a political group, though you might make the (sketchy) argument that followers of a particular brand of politics constitute a culture. They happened to be a political party that used its military machinery to quash other groups. In doing so, they pissed off a lot of other cultures who stomped them out. To make an analogy, if someone were to try to murder me, I'd fight back. It doesn't mean they're less of a person than I am, but my guess is more people are likely to side against a murderer than with them. So it goes.
Political correctness is one thing. Tolerance and cultural sensitivity is another. I stand by my statement: Multi-culturalism is ok.
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.
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
idunno if elvish is, but if we are going to adopt a new language, lets make sure its context free.
orkut is a big hit among brazilians as any other app that enables some kind of messaging, be it email, IRC, msn, icq or email.
if the brazilians are majority is simply due they accept/invite more their friends than americans. why? just a question of taste... brazilians liked more orkut's format than americans
maybe it will lead to an improvement in orkut, like selecting communities by language.
the only problem that I see is that some brazilians create communities with an english title and use only portuguese to comunicate, it upset some english speaking people. if you create a community and someone posts with an undesirable language, ignore or delete the posts...
the "wrath" that some people are experiencig when they criticize brazilians is just lack of sense of humor... people shouldn't take what happens on internet so serious...
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.
How's that feel?
:)
It feels so so fine; I was posting a sarcastic (troll) reply to a comment that quite possibly deserved it. When you make a blanket generalization, back it up with a reason. Or were you being ironic? Perhaps I'm the one who's been trolled here.
So go for it. Back up your statement that diversity is the opposite of excellence, because as it stands, it does sound very KKK-ish. Would America be a better place if it were 100% 30-year-old white males? It'd certainly be less diverse... would that make it more "excellent"? Would the world be more "excellent" if it consisted only of black 50-something-year olds? I doubt it... but I do want to hear you argue it.
And yes I realize that my original post did make several blanket statements without explicit justification -- I will state here, for the record, that the implicit justification is that tolerance of other cultures is good.
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.
The Unitarian Universalist religion is nothing like esperanto, and I consider that comparison an insult to my religion.
Like the ethnic background of the United States(commonly called the Cultural Melting Pot), UUism draws all the good bits from many of the world's religions. Esperanto was developed by one nutjob who took some bits of latin and mixed it with the world's languages.
The similarities end there. The UUA is governed mostly by democracy, whereas Esperanto has been mostly the vision of one man. Unitarian Universalism is practiced by millions; Esperanto is spoken by maybe a couple thousand people. Unitarian Universalism embraces other religions (save the parts which interfere with the UU principles and purposes- mainly, stuff like "all non-believers are heathens" and such). Esperanto is based around the assumption that your language isn't good enough, you need to be speaking Esperanto. Lastly, UU's don't go around preaching about their religion very much, which is why most people don't know of it, or don't understand it; there are no UU advocates, much less missionaries; the UUA rarely even takes positions, it's so unimposing. Esperanto advocates, meanwhile, just can't shut up about how good Esperanto is, and are constantly trying to force it on people.
Please help metamoderate.
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.
you have to know english to sign up for orkut, seeing as how the default invitation and all the questions and boxes to fill in are all in english, as well as the terms of service or whatever else you have to read before signing up. so clearly orkut is a place where everyone can speak english to be understood by most if not all of the members. Orkut, the whole interface, all the features, even the help pages are all 100% english.
most brazilian people i've encountered on orkut are plenty friendly but a noticeable few are downright inane and rude (see posts in community titled "WTF A CRAZY BRAZILIAN INVASION", et cetera), posting in their native tongue in an English-only community, bashing everyone else based on unfounded stereotypes, spamming people with Portuguese messages in a community as diverse as (for example) the Simpsons community with 13000 members and growing - jeez!
The non-English posts outnumber the "plz gimme gmail invite kthx" messages. Crazyness.
Good lord people, is this going to end up another ethnocentric American racial thing?
What? You don't speak-a da language? Good lord, how I wish I had been born in Europe.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I'd like an invitation.
Or as I like to say: Inclusion to the point of mediocrity.
There has to be a line drawn in the sand somewhere.
Who run Barter Town?
Why some push so much for English in things like Orkut. The number of lanugages in the world is just staggering. Even when you just take languages form "major" players (major in this case meaning likely to have a number of people on the Internet) you still have more than most people can learn, even if they did nothing else. Your case is an excellent example, in that you would have extreme difficult communicating with a Hindi speaker in Hindi, but it is highly likely both of you could converse in English.
I never claim that English was the best choice for an International language, I mean it was really chosen, more forces by imperalism and circumstance. However it IS the international language, and thus by far the largest secondary language. So it really is the best choice if you want to reach a diverse group, which the Internet is.
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
While I can't force them to use english (im dutch myself) , i can always point them to -why- they could talk english (if they speak it) : eg. It is way better for your whole team to know what you are saying, so you can all work together.
If they don't want to speak/can't speak english, and they are adding noise to my other communication with my other teammates, i will mute/ignore them : The same should be applied here, as i think it's ridicilous when one of the few communities on the Web, purely by natural 'forces' (invites only) has turned out to become very popular amongst Portugese people , it's a bit dumb to whine afterwards.
Hell, what is so hard to filter (or just *drumroll* dont -read-) the stuff you don;t want ?
Btw, i got invited a few months ago to join Orkut, and i found it to be nothing amazing, and fairly quickly 'polluted' as the Net got more polluted with asshats over the years too.
I usually don't ask for an invitation into something I didn't check out beforehand.
Agreed one hundred percent, which is why I discount such clique sites outright, trying to convince myself that they don't exist. The biggest problem occurs when I get hits to my public web site with a Referer inside a clique site.
Granted, there are many cases when people must cooperate (and ask each other) to do something. If I want to check in some change on sf.net I'd better ask for write access to the project's CVS.
That or post a diff with comments. But anyway:
That is understood, because there is a real need to state my cause, and if I am wrong with my changes other people will be inconvenienced.
Well at least each SourceForge.net project provides both 1. an easy way to "check [it] out beforehand," namely public CVS checkouts and 2. an obvious mechanism for an outsider to contact an appropriate insider, namely the project's Tracker. Orkut offers no such straightforward way in, not even to determine who is a valid "each other".
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.
Perhaps instead of looking at it as a "language" problem, perhaps the 'English' speakers should look at it as a challenge to get more 'English' speakers involved in Orkut.
Since the service is by invitation only, and I suspect was primarily english speaking early on, it tells me that more Brazilian's, and Portuguese speakers have invited more other Brazilian and Portuguese speakers to Orkut than English speakers have.
If you don't like the way that others are treating you at Orkut, then you have three options, Be a Quiter, Be a Whiner, or be a Builder, and get More english speakers invited.
Then again it makes no difference to me. I am not a member of Orkut.
-Rusty
You never know...
Seems like a valid solution to me.
And of course, it also seems perfectly valid for others to set up Portuguese-only, French-only, or whatever-only communities.
I belong to some English-only communities, and to some Portuguese-only communities.
Those are the only two languages in which I am capable of contributing. I guess I could probably follow discussions in Spanish or French, and I could probably get the gist of what was being said in Italian, but I am not capable of responding in any of these languages, so I only look at communities in English and Portuguese.
It doesn't bother me if there are communities that speak any of the multitude of languages I don't speak. I don't get why some people from the country where I was born (USA) think everyone should speak their language in every community and discussion on Orkut.
I'd like to point out that even if Brazilians were forced to have all their discussions in English, many of them would still be "Greek" to most Americans. For example, I belong to a community called "São Paulo odeia Paulo Maluf" ("São Paulo hates Paulo Maluf"). It's a place to talk about one of the politicians running for Mayor of São Paulo, and there are some pretty entertaining discussions going on there now. While most Brazilians know who Maluf is, and everyone in São Paulo has an opinion about him, most Americans haven't got the faintest idea of who he is (and I suspect they don't care, except that he's of Middle Eastern descent). So why on Earth should discussions in that community be in any language other than Portuguese?!
--Mark
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
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
How is it not a solution? I have communities where i can talk and they have theirs!
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
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.
A friend invited me to Orkut. I signed up. It was fun. I logged on to message boards. Jimmy has a cat. It was fun like this post. People have pictures. It is neat. I like socks. Will you be my friend?
There are you happy now? The one thing that most people don't *get* is that America is the most multicultural country in the world. More than any other county in the world, America has been built on immigration from every other country on this planet. Sure we are well more than half "white" but that represents Germans, Italians, Irish, English, Spanish, French, Russian, Polish, etc. America was filled by people who looked around their particular 'old country' and said "Fuck this Shit, I can't get ahead" and left.
Our culture is truely a melting pot of ideas, and values from all over the world, primarily northern European but not exclusively. For example most every school child in American knows what a Pinata is, and some even know how to use chop sticks. Perhaps that's why our culture is so 'exportable', because there are parts of it that are familiar to every part of the world. Even in most minor cities you can find what ever religion you follow. We speak English, not because there is any law saying you have to, but because most other people here do, immigrants learn that 'to get ahead' it's best to communicate in the 'local' language. However, unlike some courtries which will remain nameless there are no laws saying that you have to (excepting for a couple of closed-minded municipalities), large sections of our country speak Spanish, in fact all major cable companies have multiple Spanish language TV stations. You don't have to look hard in any big city to see business signs in any one of a dozen different languages.
America is not the center (or centre if you like) of the world, but we do currently have the market cornered and English (in particular American English) is 'the lowest common denominator' for the Internet, this I believe will remain. If Brazilian's want to communicate in Portuguese fine, but I believe that this will seperate them from the largest part of the Internet communitity.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
your imaginations might be right.
BTW, I'm not American, English is my 2nd language.
The Raven
> Besides, the idea that language is tied to culture is nothing more than moronic.
You are a moron if you don't see how language can be tied to culture. Please look up culture in a dictionary.
> [blah blah blah]
> I also had to learn French as my fourth in order to appease those bloody Quebecers
Interesting that you had to learn French in a French community. I guess that if I go to the US, I should expect the entire country to start speeking French just so I should not be bothered to use the native language.
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...
And that's not so unusual around here. You clearly visited the wrong places if you think Americans are culturally inept - sure, there are plenty of very backwards places in every country. Hell, I went to France and met some of the most racist, backwards-assed people I've ever encountered (a bunch of Koreans in my high school group on the trip were attacked in Lyons purely because they were Asian).
I've lived for many years in Boston too, with many foreign friends and roommates there. Also a very worldly town, plenty of European-style clubs, Eastern European parties (nobody parties like Bulgarians), rich Arab kids living in opulent apartments, Indians and Russians everywhere holding up the technology industry, and so on.
In short your experiences are not everybody's. And how on earth you could say something as atrocious as saying thousands of innocent people deserved to die for our current President's foreign policy is beyond the pale. You are a sick, sick man and I won't justify such an accusation with any further discussion. I frankly think anyone who says such a thing likely deserves a bullet themselves.
Portugese is way down on the list of languages I wish to learn, somewhere after Klingon, Elvish, and Catalan.
Quick, patent this idea now before we need to do a search for prior art when SomeCie patents it in a month or two.
The US deserved September 11th.
Regardless of anyone's opinion of the current administration, or of US foreign-policy in general, the thousands who died in the attacks on the World Trade Centre did not deserve the events of September 11th. I realize you are arguing that the nation deserved it, not the people in the buildings, but I disagree there too. The foreign policy of a nation is unfortunately far too often at odds with the will of its people. The US is in a unique position of being the world's only real economic, military, and political superpower, without another nation (or truly united collection of nations) to keep it in check.
It's practically a lose-lose situation. Because of its position, people expect a lot of (often contradictory) things from the US. Refuse to interfere militarily (eg. last year in Liberia for a bit) you lose, interfere militarily (Vietnam) you lose. I agree that US foreign policy needs work -- but nobody deserves an event like September 11th. I'll add that the Iraqis did not deserve the war in Iraq while I'm at it, though the Iraqis didn't deserve to have Saddam Hussein inflicted on the either.
Sig: I stole this sig.
I speak from experience. :-)
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Publication of an idea, especially such that is timestamped, trumps patent application. This is why Heinlein is famous relative to the waterbed. He published a description of a waterbed in the early to mid 60's, which exceeded the specifications of what was later developed as a waterbed. When whatever company first started marketing waterbeds attempted to enforce a patent, the 'infringing' company presented the description Heinlein had previously poblished, and the pattent was vacated.
(It was either that, or the original manufacturers started making them fully aware that it was not patentable, and when a follow on company attempted to patent, and claim infringement the earlier company pointed to the published description, and effectively said, sorry, too late.)
Then again, with the way the patent office and others have been operating over the past few years, who knows.
Besides I don't have 'Word' on any computer I own. As preparing the patent application in 'Word' is the current requirement, I can't do it. I also can't afford the patent search required.
-Rusty
You never know...
Are you illiterate? Read my post again. Pay close attention to the second paragraph.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
If seeing Portugese or English bothers people, there is a simple technical solution: apply language identification and just don't show content that's in the wrong language. Orkut can and should do this at the message and forum level. It could even offer automated translations "the wrong language" as a third option.
A man who speaks three languages is trilingual.
A man who speaks two languages is bilingual.
A man who speaks one language is American.
When people come to the USA, where the vastly predominant language is English, and they don't bother to learn English, then they're just lazy, and deserve whatever consequences befall them.
(When I moved to a foreign country for a couple of years, I learned quite a bit of the language before I even went - and the entire time I was there, I worked on my language skills and accent.)
Of course, that means that in the Orkut case, where it's predominantly Portugese, I think that the Americans can either (a) learn Portugese, or (b) deal with it. It's what I expect of others, it's what I expect of myself, it's what I expect of my fellow countrymen.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I believe Google bought it. There was a /. story on it way back when... maybe you'll find the info on here.
Thanks, I was aware that once a trade secret is published, it no longer is a trade secret and cannot be patented. However, for someone to claim that, one must have access to the publication. I won't tell if you don't :-)
> Then again, with the way the patent office and others have been operating over the past few years, who knows.
That's mostly what I was refering to. The one-click, two-click, hypertext, etc.
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.
The rest of the world? You mean, like, Texas?
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Is it ethnocentric to have a "community" that has been communicating in english suddenly get invaded and spammed in a foreign language? Then I get painted as the "bad guy" because I try to keep things on topic and in english? Why do they not just establish their own communities ( very easy to do in Orkut ) to have their conversations. But no, just because I am a citizen of the United States I am automatically the bad guy.
Wake up people, the objectivity around the world when it comes to the US is just a bit skewed at times.
And yes, before anyone comments, I have visited or lived in about 15 nations, and speak some french and italian, and have always learned the basic pleasentries (hello, thank you, please) in the local language no matter how brief my stay in any nation.
I'm sure this has been posted before but I want to add my vote. If the site attracts speakers of a particular language, who cares. More power to them. Surely the english speakers will find plenty of sites open to them, way more sites than for people speaking other languages. Sounds to me like if you want to stay with Orkut and speak english you should invite a few more of your english speaking friends. I hear its a pretty common language so shouldn't be much trouble.
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.
Why, aren't [EU member states' immigration agencies] allowing anybody in who isn't born there?
Immigration is expensive, and the red tape is an absolute female dog.
No, it's not. It is a religion built upon a recognition for the need for spiritualism and that faith is a deeply personal affair. Technically is it the merging of the Unitarian and Universalist churches, which both have their roots in very early medieval europe. Unitarians are actually one of the oldest derivatives of Christianity. Universalism followed a few hundred years later.
However, it, in and of itself, is no more a religion than "paganism" is.
Funny, because my minister graduated from Harvard Divinity School (which recognizes Unitarian Universalism, and just happens to be one of the oldest and most respected theological school in the country), and UU ministers are recognized across the world and in every single state.
The view that Unitarian Universalism is not a "true" religion is rather old- it has long since been accepted as a religion by the majority of theologians.
Feel free to be insulted if you wish, but if your religion doesn't share its teachings
UUs certainly share their teachings- but they do not force it upon others because they have neither the desire for global domination that other religions do, nor do they chase away their base- mainly because they celebrate spirituality, instead of instilling fear and guilt like most other religions.
doesn't take positions, lets democracy rather than reason and relevation determine dogma
Substantial reason goes into UUA policymaking, which is usually administrative only. At no time during General Assembly (the yearly convention) is dogma discussed, and the UUA does not consider it appropriate to tell others what is right and wrong. Each church is free to practice their form of UUism how they see fit.
and generally doesn't say much more than "we should all get along", then it's not a frigging religion.
Characterizing the Principles and Purposes of the UUA as "we should all ge along" is akin to characterizing pagans as a bunch of goat-slaughtering freaks, or Catholics as a bunch of child-molesting, subservient, permanently-guilt-tripped, mindless idiots.
Incidentally, the religious freedom you enjoy today if you're in America is due almost entirely in part to the beliefs of Unitarians such as Ben Franklin; Unitarians made history in the 16th century by convinc
Please help metamoderate.
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?
-
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.
The Orkut user interface is English too, so you can't tell me the Brazilians talk Portugese because they don't know English.
Ability to translate the UI and others' comments from English into mental Portuguese does not necessarily imply ability to translate one's own comments from mental Portuguese into English.
Do you realize how much it costs to run a website? Especially when the content is chiefly pictures? $5 is token change.
And what do you do when 75% of your users are essentially leeches, who have no intention of donating or paying, slowing it down for those who do? And who don't even use the site for its intended purpose?
And then when the administrators make changes to correct this imbalance, these users flood group fotologs and webforums with garbage, obscene pictures and indecipherable ranting.
And you you go so far as to call the people who complain about this behavior as 'racist', or 'xenophobes'.
Maybe its this gregarious, ridiculous attitude of wanting everything for free, and that everyone ELSE cowtow to your desires is what makes you unpopular. Or as some would say, compared to a plague of locusts.
-
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.
1. Since English is widely taught (internationally) as a second language, those who learn it as their "first language" can expect others to understand them without learning another language. This reduces the demand for english speakers to learn another language. This would apply to all english speaking countries. I'll call this the "international effect"
2. The "regional effect" is that you have less of a reason to learn other languages if everyone in the region (defined by a variable distance x) speaks your language. Eg. someone from the US travels xkm, and someone from the UK does as well. Which is more likely to end up somewhere where English is not the primary language? Basically, being multilingual is just much more of a requirement for living anywhere in the EU than in the US. It's just more important as a practical skill, because average Europeans are much more likely to use that skill than average USians.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
and why it annoys people. i'll use a simple analogy.
imagine you have a group meeting about some kind of topic. It all goes well. Then all of a sudden, dozens of others join in, talking in a separate language, often gregariously and completely off topic, and using enough slang that things like babelfish can't even hope to translate it.
Now imagine that all your original on-topic posts to your original members get drowned out by this. And then when you ask the new members to stay on topic, or try to translate their writings, they call you a racist xenophobe, or flood the group with pornography in 'protest'.
Thats whats happening. It happened on fotolog and its happening on orkut.
-
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.
well, if brazil is given an orkut.br, that sorta defeats the purpose. however, this would mean that I wouldn't have to see the brazillian neo-nazi skinheads that are slowly infecting many communities.
give and take, I suppose.
Half truths.
All air traffic is controlled in english, true. but all bussiness are dealed in english?... Common, not even remotely, world is far bigger than you suppouse.
Even if english is the largest second language, the truth is that:
1) there are very broadly used second languages in the world ie: spanish.
2) the distribution of these second languages is very sensible to geografic location.
So if you are speaking to an international audience, you better select the most used second language in the place you are, because in a lot of places english is not a sensible option.
What's in a sig?
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.
Orkut's a circle jerk. Slashdot's a circle jerk. It just so happens that here, Windows is sneezed at and joked about, whereas on Orkut, the "I'm BETTER THAN J00!!!" has turned out to be language-based, as opposed to more personal preferences. Since it's hard to argue just how much the other guy sucks when you can't speak his language, some people are getting peeved.
And babelfish goes unmentioned.
I gave orkut a shot. Frankly, looking at the Pittsburgh dating scene through search filters scared the crap outta me.
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.
Sure holland may be an exception, plenty of foreigners say this, as the fast majority of us speak and understand english fairly well. Not fluent but less face it your a yank, raping the english language for centuries and your proud of it.
So it is bit of give and take, we can't expect americans to learn a second language because america doesn't have any communities inside that speak another language (that is a bullshit excuse, they do). The valid excuse, if americans travel a bit they have to learn an awfull lot of languages just for a trip to europe. Dutch, german, french, danish, swedish, italian, portugese and if they visit england hardest of all, english.
BUT it isn't impossible for them to learn at least the opening lines. It is not like you even need to be fluent in them. Just make a tiny little effort.
Although I must admit that personally I find it rude to speak dutch when their is an english speaker present. Fluent english is a valuable skill to have for any dutch working person and excluding a co-worker at the cost of brushing up your language skills just doesn't make sense.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Somebody mod the parent up please, I thought this was pretty insightful.
Of couse you don't.
Neither do I think do those who do this kinda thing, they are like the gnaa and "ME TOO" aolers. God knows what motivates them but I don't think it is making friends.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
.node is multilingual (french and english for now) and we certainly appreciate the subtleties of your language. Buzz me if you want to have a good peek inside. Subscribing to .node gets a blog, a foaf file, forums, calendars and a bunch of communities. Oh, and I heard people hung out there too :)
if i had an invite i would learn the language
this is any different in the business world?
The answer to the question posed by this development at Orkut: multilingual sites that allow users to choose to view content by languages (plural). ISSHO is one such experiment.
... is a moot point.
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"
For a linguist you seem to have some of your facts out of whack in regards to the French language.
-French is the most widely taught second language in the world, after English. French is the third most taught language in the United States (For most of our history it was the second until whites finally recognized the higher prevelance of Spanish) Personal quips should never be used in place of facts. French is still somewhat considered the language of diplomacy (Both English and French reign here) and is also considered to be one of the essential languages for International business (Among, not surprisingly English, German, Japanese, and Mandarin). France is also the second-largest international investor behind the US.
French and English are the two working languages The United Nations, UNESCO, The International Monetary Fund, The International Labour Bureau, The International Olympic Committee, The 31-member Council of Europe, and The European Community.
French is the dominant working language at The European Court of Justice, The European Tribunal of First Instance, The European Court of Auditors in Luxembourg, The Press Room at the European Commission in Brussels, and the International Red Cross (Where it is also the Official Language).
You might also have forgotten that French-speaking Africa has an immense population and a geographical area larger than the United States. And behind English is the most taught second language in the United States If you were looking for a job with the State Department you'd find overwhelmingly they look for people with proficiency in French as a second language. The closest second language had a third as many jobs and was looking for Spanish speakers. So I'd say it's plenty useful for working for the US Government and in diplomacy.
French is a very useful language to know, as is English and I agree with you on your statements on English. I'm just sick of people and their whole Anti-French attitude, it's just bigotry wearing a clown nose - especially from my fellow Americans who for being so rich and educated certainly hold a strong anti-foreigner mentality more than I've seen in almost any other non-homogenized society.
The source I used is here [intstudy.com], and those facts are also mirrored on other pages about the French language on study programs and Higher Education institutions around the world.
Something intelligent here.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'd agree with this sentiment. I've entered an english community. The title is in english, the description in english etc etc. However, I have been getting a lot of non-english (Brazilian?) mails in my orkut inbox from some of those forums.
If I'd entered a form with a Brazilian descriptor I might expect that, but if a Brazilian enters an english channel (and can read english to understand the channel description), he/she should probably use english as per the rest of the channel users' understanding.
Here's the source again, sorry. http://www.intstudy.com/articles/practicalfrench.h tm
Something intelligent here.
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.
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!
Ayways: I do not have gotten any invitation yet and all people I know don`t have gotten one, too. (Were in Germany an willing and able to speak English ;) )
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!
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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.
"French-speaking Africa has an immense population and a geographical area larger than the United States"
Not relevant. Antarctica is pretty large as well. It's the population stats that count. Why throw in land area (containing a large number of different countries, I might add)? Fine, add up U.S., Canada and Mexico.
I propse a new quiz to be taken by all US citizens entering another country:
- Say the word "Hello" in our language
- Say the word "thank you" in our language
- Show us the proper to greet somebody
Seriously. Even withou this quiz, learning these takes a few minutes, and it opens up a complete new world.I cannot stress this enough: Learn these things. Just imagine what would happen if someone came to you, gave you a headbutt and yelled "Hey! Bitch!" to you. Seriously, what is considered a friendly greeting in one country, might not be in a different one.
Disclaimer: I'm not suggesting any country or culture uses the expression "Hey! Bitch!" as a greeting.
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...!
I have them for Orkut.. reply with name and email address if you want one.
feel free to send one my way...h na.com
haplo-dated-1091020078.dba2ed@majere.epit
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
ROTFLMAO
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
What the heck does orkut means? Is it an english word?
It's the name of the engineer, Orkut Buyukkokten (who's heritage is clearly that of a non-English speaking nation), who wrote it for one company and then illegally reused the same code for Google.
"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.
It seems to me that the best solution would be to just tag everything with a language specification and give users an (overridable) default language option so that they don't have to choose every time.
Once this is done, then allow users options to only "see" stuff in certain languages. Sure, it means that some people will see things that other people don't, but that's close to the current situation where people can't read the non-English messages. The only difference here is they don't get the opportunity to feed it into Babelfish, but then they can just not have the option turned on if that bothers them.
The final part of the solution would be to display "languages spoken" on the profile pages, perhaps along with a skill level, so that people know to whom they should be speaking Spanish and to whom English, and so forth.
Optional extras include also allowing users to pick text directionality so that people can write in RTL scripts, and tagging in the HTML with lang and dir attributes so that, in the future, "clever" browsers can give the option to automagically translate portions of a document. (Could happen if more sites start specifying their languages.)
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)
that brazilians are being encouraged to change ther "Country" field to Irak...
how long until
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..
You miserable pentelhos, melhor que voces fica queto and learn a bit of portuguese ate voces podem entender tudo que occora nosso mundo.
I thought the USA was becoming bilingual hablando espanol tambien ann so easily understanding gente que fala uma idioma vizinha.
Brazilians can teach you quite a bit about football and guncrime. Tambem suas meninhas sao bem feias, sem bunda, sem graca.
Tchao! DK
Bill Gates is more much powerfull tham Linus Tolvards.
Bill Gates breaked monopoly laws and IS an asshole.
Linus Tolvards is GOD.
You are an asshole!
US isn't a Freedom country.
The world doesn't respect US, the world fear US.
Brazil is the more powerfull country in the world because brazil have more people in orkut!
Iraqians like brazilians because brazilians are the betest soccer players.
Iraqians hate US because US invaded their country and killed their people.
Serious: China _IS_ the more powerfull country in the world, not US
> First, I'd like to mention that your argumentum ad hominem really displays your level of tolerance.
Interesting that you should refer to people who live in Quebec as 'those bloody Quebecers' but then don't expect any reply. Should I understand that in addition to being a racist, you are also incapable of being coherent.
>> Interesting that you had to learn French in a French community.
> No, I learned French in an English community. I live in English-Canada (the vast majority of Canada)
> where almost all the people speak nothing but English.
There are French Canadians in all parts of Canada. New Brunswick is officially bilingual, Ottawa has a large French community, there are a lot of people all accross the country who come from non English speaking countries and speak their native tongue very well.
But I guess that just as with 'culture', you have your own 'selective' definition of "almost all" that everyone should guess.
> > > I also had to learn French as my fourth in order to appease those bloody Quebecers
In case you can't follow your own threads let me assure you that these 'bloody Quebecers' don't really care if you don't speak French if you don't live in Quebec. Are you trying to imply that Quebecers would like everyone in Canada to speak French? If you are, you are sadly mistaken.
What you're espousing is the American way, not the Canadian system.
I never meant to create the impression that I was espousing the Canadian system (in fact, I'm not sure where you got that idea from); however, it should be noted that I am not exactly espousing the American system either for the simple reason that the American system has failed. As long as people refer to themselves as Latino-Americans, African-Americans, or whatever-Americans, (and yes, I realize that those are supposedly "ethnicities", however, cultures form around these fictitious divisions) a (successful) cultural melting pot does not exist.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
I think we are enough american slashdot users to compensate, so lets invite each other until we beat those brazillians!!! :D
:)
Give me a gmail invitation while you are at it heh, for now you can reach me on urbieta at yahoo dot com
thanks
4ny0n3 sp33k l337?
d4 pa1n!
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Those who would like to view this (or any other site) in Portuguese, can use the fish
Problem solved.
I memory serves me well, I believe we won the last World Cup...
The lack of a collective name for the inhabitants of the USA doesn't give them the right to steal the term "American".
Hey, they even seem to lack a name for "collective name for the inhabitants of somewhere". (Gentilicio in Spanish).
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").
His comment was probably wrong in trying to attribute one trait to a whole people, but this is quite different from racism.
Nevertheless, there are definite differences of average behaviour among people from different countries and racism has nothing to do with it.
What really happened, IMHO, is that at this particular moment Brazilians were ready to jump into it - they liked the invitation and networking mechanism more than other people and answered by inviting everybody they knew, creating something the world hasn't yet saw, an international Internet application where the Americans are not the majority.
I quit visiting my orkut "japanese language", "sushi", etc. I can't fucking use UTF-8 japanese at all! The whole idea is to use the language the group as as the "perferered language". They have many english/korean/etc groups for the same subject. I don't have a problem with it. I would just like a better text storage on orkut to use UTF-8. They're as archic as slashdot! Then agian slashdot still has yet to discover CSS, so I'm not surprized.
I believe it is a very natural tendency in the development of any social network. The fact that the Brazilians have taken the place of Germans or Indianas was in part a matter of timing, in part a coincidence. As another comment mentioned, many North Americans eventually ignored invitations to Orkut because of the Friendster fever that had already passed by them, while this fever had never reached Brazil.
:-(
I hope there are enough Brazilians around with points to mod me up. Hugs.
--
My 2c: at least you Americans are enjoying the opportunity to get a (rather traumatic, but even though interesting) contact with our language. It's only sad that most people posting in Portuguese use a very lame style and a very low language level.
A community to discuss socks and post cat pictures. Would you like join?
I'm sick of that fucking site. I was one of the first 1,000 users, and back then (that makes it sound so long ago) it was actually fun to use.
:::)))"
Now every time I log on, I have >40 messages from Brazilians and God knows who else, spamming the fuck out of groups with shit like "I waNT hax0r server 2oo3" or "I WANT GMAIL INVITE PLZ OKE
I thought it would remain an interesting online community. How wrong I was.
No, it's not. It is a religion built upon a recognition for the need for spiritualism and that faith is a deeply personal affair. Technically is it the merging of the Unitarian and Universalist churches, which both have their roots in very early medieval europe. Unitarians are actually one of the oldest derivatives of Christianity. Universalism followed a few hundred years later.
e ms to be quite close to "we should all get along." And they don't set themselves up as a religion, but rather a house where religion can be learned and discussed in a, as I said origianlly, very good and non-confrontational way.
Do you have a scholarly study by someone unaffiliated with the Unitarians to back up that claim? If not, then the 1960s religion is a modern invention with as much historical lineage as modern wicca.
Funny, because my minister graduated from Harvard Divinity School, and UU ministers are recognized across the world and in every single state.
Scholarly acceptance or lack thereof doesn't mean that you are or are not a "religion." Neither does governmental recognition of individual ministers make UUism a religion.
A better term than religion would be "interfaith collaborative." If you don't have substantial core dogma then you aren't a religion. Every last single major religion DOES have substantial core dogma--something that answers the question "what do you believe" with a spiritual rather than political answer.
Characterizing the Principles and Purposes of the UUA as "we should all ge along" is akin to characterizing pagans as a bunch of goat-slaughtering freaks, or Catholics as a bunch of child-molesting, subservient, permanently-guilt-tripped, mindless idiots.
I'll thank you not to insult wiccans, druids, and individual "magickers" with a patently untrue slander, or the whole of the Catholic congregations with the actions of their priesthood.
As for the matter at hand, UUA's statement of principles (http://www.uua.org/aboutuua/principles.html)
se
Incidentally, the religious freedom you enjoy today if you're in America is due almost entirely in part to the beliefs of Unitarians such as Ben Franklin;
Oh, for crying out loud.
I think I've heard everyone from agnostics to atheists to humanists to pagans claim the Founding Fathers as a member of their minority. If what you espouse is true and right and good, then you don't need an appeal to fame to justify yourself.
I respect UUism for what it is, and I think it's a good movement even if it's inherently flawed (but only by being TOO 'good'.) I do not consider it a religion, but that doesn't mean that I think that you're insulting and demeaning it with your half-thought arguments and weak allegations of historical authority.
Are you saying in 2050 only 65 million people will speak english?
only 166 millio will speak mqandarin?
YOur number don't even add up to a billion, what are the other 9 billion people going to speak in 2050?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Get real - esperanto's been indubitably dead since the '50s.
So I think you're both right and wrong. Americans live such insulated lives (the US is a huge country, and some people rarely encounter individuals that don't speak English) that there is less evident need for them to learn foreign languages. But even in places like Texas, where over a third of the population is Latino (and many speak no English at all), few Texans bother to learn Spanish. There is an urgency for Brazilians to learn English, but no urgency for Americans to learn Portuguese. People learn English partly because they want to communicate with English-only speakers, and partly because of the opportunities available in the extremely wealthy US, where poor people may eat Velveeta and white bread, but they don't starve (unless they're kids with negligent parents).
Things are really going to get interesting when the US Latino population gets big enough and rich enough so their presence can't be ignored, both on the web and in real life. What are all you monolinguals going to do when that happens, huh?
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
But Hindi is NOT the official language, and there were massive outcries when the government attempted to make it the official language. Whereas English is a second language for all Indians (possibly learned simultaneously for a few people), Hindi is the native language for only part of the population. The southern Indian states were not at all happy with the prospect of being forced to speak Hindi, which is why English is the official language in India. However, if you want to understand a politicians speech, and he/she is speaking in Hindi, knowing English won't do any good in that situation
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Then why are you so quick to want to sacrifice Canadian culture (yes, they used to have one before all this multiculturalism stuff got started) and American culture for the noble goal of multiculturalism.
Because, at least in the Canada I grew up in, the fact that so many immigrant groups make up Canadian society is an integral part of our culture. Some of the biggest cultural events of the year here in Victoria are co-sponsored by Heritage Canada and the Inter-Cultural Association: FolkFest, Luminara, Summer at Centennial Square, etc. I would argue that if growing up and living in the midst of a society where a huge majority bring their languages and cultures with them, I would have far less interest in travel, global and local politics, and cuisine, than if I hadn't.
I never said we should encourage division based on what one's ancestors did. But you cannot argue that people are all different, and that many people share common traits -- that's reality. Events like FolkFest are positive manifestations of showing off and sharing that with everyone else for a few days. It's not a "we're better than you" thing, it's a "hey check out these cool things we do/food we make/language we speak" thing. Having different cultural groups within a country that maintain some of their old-country culture is great so long as one understands that when you come here you may have to sacrifice a few things if your culture starts treading on others.
When you say that Canada had a culture before all this multi-culturalism stuff got started, which culture are you referring to? The wide assortment of amerindian nations before Europeans arrived? The British? The French? The Spanish? They were all here in various capacities. The Ukrainians and other Eastern Europeans who arrived en mass in the 1800s to farm? The Chinese who were brought in the 1800s for the railway? Which unified culture are you talking about here, because I can't think of a single point in our history where we've had one unified culture. If we have, I'd like to know about it, 'cause it doesn't appear to be in any of those Pierre Burton history texts sitting on my shelf.
The moment you accept that "The beliefs of majority of Germans circa 1940 were evil by the standards that we would use today" you accept that all cultures are in fact not equal
First of all, I don't accept that. I accept that a relatively small number of Germans formed a socialist, but very nationalist party, which was brought to power by a German population that was possibly reacting to what they saw as oppressive restrictions imposed on their country by the Versailles Treaty of 1919. The leader of this party was incredibly charismatic, which obviously worked in his favour. The guy also happened to be, a sociopath/psychopath. He and many of the high-ranking officers around him were ready to do anything for power, including the extermination of large chunks of the population that they considered a hindrance to them. And you're right, we would call them evil today. But I won't say most Germans were; a huge proportion of the ones in power, and a few who weren't certainly were though. And one might argue that to murder is a crucial part of any culture during a war. I can't think of many cultures that espoused murder during non-war times. The Aztecs, Olmecs, and Toltecs come to mind as cultures that were very violent even during peacetime, particularly the Toltecs, and all practiced human sacrifice to a certain degree, so I suppose that would be considered a crucial part of their culture.
The Nazis under Hitler were certainly expansionist, just like the British were, just like the French were, just like the Spaniards and the Portugese were. Territorial expansionism means war. War means murder. And yeah, expansionist cultures are trouble. In the end they start pissing people off and either learn their lesson or get stomped out. That's balance.
Wouldn't fighting back be intolerant
I side with the Brazilians here. Let everybody post in whatever language they like. The internet is all about connecting the world, most of whose inhabitants do not speak english. So if you can't read it, learn to read it.
These folks might disagree.
(No, I'm not an Esperantist.)
I cant understand why this is a problem. Every science fiction reader should be waiting for this kind of thing to happen sooner or later. When I created my account at Slashdot, I wrote everything in english, because afterall the site is all in english. I created my account in Orkut in english too, but now I dont see why, because I interact much more with brazillian friend and friends of friends then with international people... I naturally started to use more portuguese than english, because I just found brazillan friends everywhere. I tought I would interact a lot with international people, like it happened in my old IRC times, but today I cant stand anymore the big wold-wide communities (like "programming", "free software", "atheists")... I simply cant have a fruitfull conversation on these international groups. Its just flame wars... Now if a non-brazillian wants to take part of a group created by brazillian why cant this person just try to send an english message, and see if anybody wants to talk in english (or other language, perhaps)?... Why cant this person create a parallel community? this already happened in the good old ICQ and usenet times. I think if someone has a genuine interest in a community subject, the love for it will break all language barriers!... :)
To finish: this is a non-problem. Ive seen people talking about "fight back and do blablabla". What *fight* my friends?!?! if brazillians are using the site more than north-americans this is just an epiphenomenon emergin from subtle characteristic on how brazillians relato to their friends... Lets just keep living admiring the peculiarities of each human being... If anybody wants to read messages in portuguese about any subject hes interested, I volunteer myself as a translator.
Nicolau Werneck - NIC1138
"The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of childhood into maturity" -- Thomas Huxley
Well, what would you expect of a society based on a "we are the chosen few" meme? They are almost pre-selecting their members for arrogance. No wonder they have communication problems.
Orkut is by invitation only and, therefore, private. Since I've never been invited, it doesn't matter to me.
I don't care what language you speak normally. I only speak English; it is *my* native language. Would you want me to speak to you if you don't understand me? No? Likewise.
American arrogance? Hello kettle, this is pot; you're black. I heard the French smell bad, English food is disgusting and that you shouldn't drink the water in Mexico. I don't know for sure; I've never been to those countries. It's just what I've heard. That being said, I don't believe Americans have a monopoly on arrogant nationalism. Ours just gets more media coverage. :)
It's a very dark ride.
Ah, the old days . . .
Sorry, I missed the episode when Brazil was evicted from America
MOD THE CHILD UP!
1. "This is translated from a Dutch 'popular science' magazine" - i.e. they are not my numbers.
2. "Young speakers (age 15-24)" - i.e. a rather small subset of the entire world's population
Apologies accepted.
By the way, are you so quick to call other people racists when they refer to other cultures, such as Americans, in a demeaning and offensive manner? If so, we really need more people like you; nowadays, in Canada, it's common to hear things that would be considered racist if said about any culture other than the Americans, yet no one says anything to those people.
I feel that to a certain extent, we are all a bit racist. When I find that I have a racist attitude, I try to correct it. Although I generally try to avoid the term; Yes, if someone has a racist attitute I point it out.
W.r.t. Americans, I work for an American company and I have daily contacts with Americans. The people I work with are very nice and very bright.
Also, most comments I hear about Americans are not directed at the people but at the government they elected. Thinking that Bush is an idiot is not being racist.
Thinking that the Americans are idiots for placing such a mad man in office is only racist if you think that other races/countries are more intelligent. :-)
There are also Hungarian Canadians in all parts of Canada; however, that doesn't make those parts Hungarian Canada.
Where did I claim any such thing?
Yes, and the majority of those people also have a decent grasp of English; certainly more than have a decent grasp of French.
Agreed. Your original comment was that in English-Canada,... almost all the people speak nothing but English.. I still disagree on that point unless almost all has taken on a new meaning.
Whether they care or not doesn't change the fact that if it wasn't for their adherence to the French language I would not have had to learn French.
Again, unless you come to "live" in Quebec, Quebecers don't really care if you learn French so I don't see how you would have been forced to learn French. In any case, I would rather prefer not to be called a "bloody Quebecer."
TROLL?!
:)
I AM dutch so I should know what I'm talking about
Privacy is terrorism.
Furem sua hegemonia internacional eu seu McDonalds e seu Hollywood onde o sol não brilha.
Pela maneira, amo muito todo isso[1] do Big Mac e essa Julia Roberts!
[1]Esto é a mesma frase que McDonalds usa nas suas copas por I'm Lovin' It.
A melhor parte dos seus errores foram por não saber as formas plurales, especialmente os verbos que terminam com M.
E não, não falo português, falo espanhol com palavras portuguesas.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
From http://www.instituto-camoes.pt/bases/lingua/portug ueselanguage.htm
I've also heard (at the UN organization where I work) that it is the most spoken in the southern hemisphere. Portuguese speakers are called (a bit unfortunately...) lusophones.
Wouldn't it be simpler for the system to approximately assign a language to any commment.
Then allow readers to filter threads by language, similar to search engines.
The poster could also help out if necessary. This shouldn't cost much computationally.
Yes, a lot of them aren't nice, but at least remember that they aren't the "average brazilian". Reuters article is deceptive when say that brazilians spend more time than americans. This is a very small percentage of brazil population. While now half the USA has broadband, in Brazil just the upper classes have internet access. This bad behaviour isn't representative of the brazilian people.
Everybody knows Orkut is supposed to be in Turkish, tesekkur ederim.
I, for one, welcome our new portuguese speakers Overlords!
Oh wait, I am brazillian!.... This Time I AM THE OVERLORD!
Knee before me, Slashdot!
As a member of ORKUT and a friend of Breigh's I can tell you that it has gotten bad I have had to kick a few people for not adhering to my no Portuguese rule. If I had joined a Brazilian web service I would try to use there language Why the f@#K can't these people do the same?
Peace, Love, And Oreo cookies
Kijk, jij snapt me tenminste :)
"omelet du fromage, omelet du fromage!!"
Privacy is terrorism.
But I guess that this is the moderation system that we get stuck with when anyone who's been on the site for a while and posts regularly is banned from moderating.
Thank you, in all seriousness. I've been trying and trying to figure out what the hell I did wrong...
Last month my karma rolled over to 'Excellent,' I always metamod - and I haven't seen a mod point in months. Yet the relevant FAQ seems to say that no one with sufficiently positive karma is banned from moderating. Even asking about it approximates whining about it, but I'm mostly trying to understand the lay of the land, here - really.
"At least I'm not the only one," etc. etc.
<grrr>
é tipo daquele jeito... vivemos em um mundo cercado po palavras em inglês e quem ñ sabe falar inglês acaba se fudeno... mas ñ é bem assim... eu so brasileiro, falo em português, e ñ pago pau pa americano ñ(se quiserem entender o q falo e minhas girias escritas e faladas aprendam português porra)...
mesmo com tudo q o q nós que ñ falamos inglês ñ temos aprendemos po exemplo d linux(programa, administra, estuda, trabalha ou somente brinca)... conseguimos ser melhores q os puta dos americanos, o q diriam se tivessemos essa enxurrada d doc's e afins em nossa lingua...
quem é brasileiro q fale português, quem é americano q fale em inglês... o q ñ vo faze é baba ovo d um puta americano q se acha o tal por ser americano... e q acha q tenho q fala inglês pq fala em português é errado... tipo... so do time em q valoriza minha cultura é o mais importate(já q temos uma, pois a cultura americana é mcdonald's, hollywood, casa branca, dinheiro e guerra... essa é a cultura americana, o q posso tirar disso... NADA!!!!!)
o q os brasileiros tem a faze é o q os americanos fazem a muito tempo somos maioria, somo + poderosos, temos + soldados, então nós ditamos as regas... no caso do orkut, ouvi fala q somos cerca d 40% d tudo.. entaum nós mandamos porra!!!! se somos maioria temos q impô nossas regras.... entaum eles q falem pt_BR... e ñ nós en.........
UMA SIMPLES OBSERVAÇÃO É QUE NESTE TEXTO USEI UMA LINGUAGEM AMPLAMENTE USADA EM BATE-PAPOS NO BRASIL!!!!
QUALQUER DÚVIDA PEÇA UMA PESSOA Q FALE PORTUGUÊS FLUENTEMENTE QUE ELE IRÁ TRADUZIR TUDO DO JEITO CORRETO.
AS TRADUÇÕES DO GOOGLE OU FREETRANSLATION(POR EXEMPLO) NÃO IRÁO TRADUZIR O TEXTO CORRETAMENTE.
MUITO OBRIGADO! E FELICIDADES A TODOS O BRASILEIROS QUE IRÃO LER ESTE TEXTO SEM NENHUM PROBLEMA.... E O RESTO....DIGO....
I AI MANU... O BAGUI É O SIGUINTI CERTU CUPADI!!! BRASILERU AQ NUM PAGA D LOQUI E NEM D COMÉDIA CERTU.. ENTAUM SE CRUZA O MEU CAMIN VAI TOMBA LIGERO CERTU MANU!!!
AI... UM SALVE PUS GUERRERO.. ZÉ POVIN EU LAMENTO!!!!
o homem que matou o mau era mau também.. - lado shell da força, quem tem o dedo de gesso tromba este é