Reaching out to the Mandarin speaking community

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#1

I’m gonna start a new thread by quoting a post from the “[url=http://tw.forumosa.com/t/new-forum-thread/37763/1 Forum Thread[/url]”:

[quote=“Goose Egg”]These are great suggestions.

Just a thought on one of the things you said: [quote=“Loretta”]… in recent months I’ve met an awful lot of Taiwanese people who read occasionally. Most have trouble following the discussions and are unwilling to post, which is probably very wise of them, but if they’re there and reading the site then they represent a market segment that could be better served[/quote]
We do not track Native Mandarin speakers who regularly read Forumosa. I can only infer what I see from our Google Analytics - which tells us how many Chinese encoded browsers and Chinese Windows are being used to view the website.

When I lived in Taipei, I normally used Chinese Windows and sometimes left my browser’s encoding at Big-5 Chinese, even though my Chinese reading and writing is barely basic level. So to me, it seems our readership among native Mandarin speakers is relatively small - less than 20%. This also represents the greatest growth opportunity for the website - with less than 500,000 foreigners of all stripes in Taiwan, it behooves us to engage the other 22.5M somehow.

I would like to get a better understanding of what they think of the website and how we could make things easier for them - apart from everyone switch to using Chinese :wink: And of course, I would really like to get a deep understanding of what Forumosan Regulars think of the website, who they are so we can tailor things to them, and how can we improve things going forward

I wouldn’t expect any major changes to accomodate non-Native English speakers, however.[/quote]

I had a couple thoughts. There are various “double-click a word to see its definition” services available. Some of these might be integrible :slight_smile: to phpBB. I wonder if there is such a thing available that translates from English to Mandarin. That would be very appealing to our Mandarin-speaking lurker community.

An alternative (much less appealing in my eyes) would be a translation field, somewhere convenient in the layout.

And maybe a “Broken English” forum for learners to fu@k around shamelessly in. That might get fun.

#2

Let me know if you find something. I did a quick look at the usual sources but didn’t see anything interesting

It would be nice if with a click on a link at the post a new window would open with a Babelfish (rough) translation.

Let me know what you find

#3

From another thread

And my thought …

That’s what Forumosa is … a meeting point for foreigners living/working in Taiwan …

If Taiwanese can find a foothold here they are welcome, some did and contribute to Forumosa … others gave up … some might take our complaints about Taiwan personal … because they’ve never been outside Taiwan and don’t know how it is to live in a foreign country, culture.

At times we can be very harsh … but that’s when we had a bad hair day, some of us have them every day … :slight_smile:

I don’t think that Forumosa is an ideal place to ‘learn’ english, as many users here are non-native english speakers, as I am … and their english skills suck … as mine are :slight_smile:

#4

I added a tool from Babelfish below. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong Chinese (simplified)! Can you help me find the correct Babelfish coding for Trad Chinese?

But its a nice quick fix :slight_smile: That said, I would caution anyone from really using it heavily. Our English is difficult enough to understand :wink:

#5

OK, I’ve added a “BIG-5” link to the topic pages (upper left above the first post of a page and bottom right below the last post - next to the Printer Friendly links) so these will now use Babelfish to run a Trad Chinese translation. It ain’t perfect, so I’m open to a better solution.

I’ve removed the Babelfish translator jacascript from the SiteMap below, but I kept it up front. I’ll add them to the Forum Summary and Search Result pages (not now, but remind me if I don’t do this soon)

Cheers

#6

[quote=“Belgian Pie”]From another thread

And my thought …

That’s what Forumosa is … a meeting point for foreigners living/working in Taiwan …

If Taiwanese can find a foothold here they are welcome, some did and contribute to Forumosa … others gave up … some might take our complaints about Taiwan personal … because they’ve never been outside Taiwan and don’t know how it is to live in a foreign country, culture.

At times we can be very harsh … but that’s when we had a bad hair day, some of us have them every day … :slight_smile:

I don’t think that Forumosa is an ideal place to ‘learn’ English, as many users here are non-native English speakers, as I am … and their English skills suck … as mine are :slight_smile:[/quote]

one word; pandora’sbox…it’s hard enough arguing with each other…add in a bunch of people with a completely different cultural context and who would be naturally defensive of our frequent attacks and prognostications on their fucked up culture (as opposed to our own equally fucked up ones)…god it could get messy…imagine 100 AC dropouts dropping in every day :smiley:

#7

Yes, you’re right and worse … Forumosa is going to be banned in China now … 1 billion chinese now understand what we are talking about … :slight_smile:

#8

Rubbish! Half the time I have no idea what people are talking about, and I’m supposed to be from foreign. Run it through babelfish and it’ll ALL be incomprehensible apart from Buttercup. And she’s only right half of the time.

#9

[Hi, I am a newbie here

Here they come. He heard about us from his forum guy! And he’s made his first Taiwaneser friend already. As soon as word of this gets out there’ll be millions of 'em.

#10

The Chinese Internet police is really incredible, I think if they found out, this site could be banned in China.

#11

[quote=“Goose Egg”]OK, I’ve added a “BIG-5” link to the topic pages (upper left above the first post of a page and bottom right below the last post - next to the Printer Friendly links) so these will now use Babelfish to run a Trad Chinese translation. It ain’t perfect, so I’m open to a better solution.

I’ve removed the Babelfish translator jacascript from the SiteMap below, but I kept it up front. I’ll add them to the Forum Summary and Search Result pages (not now, but remind me if I don’t do this soon)

Cheers[/quote]

I tested the Big-5 function, the website turned into traditional Chinese version.

Amazing and amusing!

The fish didn’t work well, though, translation turned out to be really funny!

#12

I’m right all the time. You just have no way to verify this.

#13

[quote=“Loretta”]Hi, I am a newbie here

Here they come. He heard about us from his forum guy! And he’s made his first Taiwaneser friend already. As soon as word of this gets out there’ll be millions of 'em.[/quote]

well he seems friendly at least…just don’t mention the dalai lama…i mentioned him once but i think i got away with it…

#14

I’m sure they know about us already.

Besides, being banned in China would lend us some well-deserved street cred :sunglasses:

#15

Just curious – do we foreigners expect that the bulletin board systems at, say, the “zhongguo shibao” will implement English translation features so that we can participate? I don’t think so.

I think the system in place at those BBS (and historically at Forumosa) is fine. If you have the language chops to participate, you are welcome for the most part. If you can’t read the language in question, there are plenty of other BBSs to serve you. Particularly with the emphasis on English learning and teaching in Taiwan, this is a slippery slope. If I found a passage on a Chinese language BBS that I couldn’t understand, I’d print it out and take it to my teacher, not expect the site to help me with it (unless it’s specifically a language-learning site, which F.com is not.) I’m not trying to be unwelcoming – just pointing out that when one site tries to be everything to everyone, usually it becomes nothing to many.

#16

It would be very funny indeed to see Chinese and English writers arguing with each other, with each side using Babelfish to translate the other’s messages.

#17

Probably get farther than we do currently as so-called bilinguals… :smiley:

I wonder if the more nonsensical Chinese texts, when put through Babelfish, might make sense? Anybody got a “baguwen” we can try?

#18

Err… not too sure about this myself. The Taiwanese who have stuck around all seem to have a very high level of English, plus the all important sense of humour and some cultural understanding.

I think it would be fantastic to have more Taiwanese around, but IMHO running the whole caboodle through a machine translator (or in fact any translator) is not going to be pretty. There are tons of Chinese forums in English where despite the high language ability of the Chinese posters, some very important subtleties get lost in translation and everyone ends up fighting. I’m also worried about Forumosa turning from a first class expat forum into a ‘HELP ME WITH THIS ENGLISH QUESTION’ forum.

Maybe set up another forum specifically for Taiwanese and foreign Chinese speakers with some Chinese information on what Forumosa is about and how not to take everything too seriously? Then all the free-English-tuition noise can go in there and everyone’s happy.