Arturo's dashboard

Miro has the potential to become a real alternative to the corporate media, changing the way people all over the world watch television. But that won't happen with an Anglo-centric approach.

The point of departure is very good: having chosen a name like "miro" (Spanish for "I look at") shows a clear sensibility about the issue. Alas, limited resources probably forced the Miro Team to focus on the English-speaking community, which incidentally happens to be the biggest in the Net. It makes sense to start building a project concentrating around your areas of maximum strength and avoiding your weak spots.

As a consequence, non-English channels in the Miro Guide are poorly organised. When you navigate a given language, you are constantly finding channels in other languages, which is really annoying. The main problem stems from the possibility of submitting a new channel in three different languages. I assume this was done by analogy with the three categories, but it shouldn't have been done. You could argue whether there is a border between comedy and drama, for instance, but there is a clear distinction between Russian and German. If you can very well have "multi-category" channels, you cannot have multi-lingual channels: most of your users will understand either Russian or German, but not both.

In short, the multilingual registration was a mistake that should be corrected as soon as possible. Existing channels should be purged and ascribed to their main language. If a creator has produced items in more than one language, she can submit different, separate channels for each of them.

The information provided (description of the channel, etc.) should be in the language of the channel and not in English as it's all too frequent now. This has also an explanation: the form is in English and the natural reaction is to fill it in English too. Forms should be translated as a priority; in the meantime, an indication should be given to provide the required information in the language of the channel if this is not English.

That's in the near future. In a more or less distant future (maybe with Miro 3.0?), I'd like to see a completely new interface in which the English language is just one among equals. In such a setting, when you first get to the homepage, you choose the language (and your choice is registered for the future), and then you are offered all the services related to that language. Not necessarily everything is availably in every language, especially in a volunteer-translated project like Miro, but theoretically at least every language can be as important as any other. For an example of this, see debian.org or, even better, europa.eu, the official site of the European Union.

Needless to say that, for internal purposes (communication with team members, forums, etc.), I have no objection whatsoever to English, as today's lingua franca, being the one and only language. Let's translate what has to be translated; for the rest, let's be efficient. Good translations are very demanding and we can't waste our energies.