Thread:Support/Mistake/reply

Discussions about French translations are conducted in French on the portal talk page. It is recommended to ask questions on Support in English, so that the pool of people who can answer a question is as big as possible. So you are right that having sub-pages in different languages for Support is going to confuse our current system.

But, people whose English is not good enough to ask a question in English do occasionally ask questions on Support. In future, we can expect the number of people translating on translatewiki.net without knowing English to increase. These translators will be translating from a fallback language such as Russian, Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and this is the reason why localising translatewiki.net into these languages is very useful. So, it would be good to come up with a plan on how to assist these users in getting support.

Would it work to put a system in place where people without English ask questions on the portal talk page of their fallback language (or any other language they know). Translators of fallback languages would assist by answering general support questions or translating any questions they can't answer and posting them on the main Support page. They would also need to be willing to translate the answer back into the fallback language. If nobody did anything with a question for a few days, then the person asking the question could always try leaving a question on the main Support page and see whether anybody is willing to guess at the meaning (perhaps via google translate if you wanted to have a really wild guess!). We could then include a link at the top of the main Support page labelled "multilingual support" or "need to ask a question in another language" or something, linking to an explanation of the system. The downside is that this system is slower than asking in English. Or is it best to have Support subpages in different languages?