How about making this community multilingual?

I'm not speaking for the bosses here, but in my mind establishing a multi-lingual community is way down the list. For technical and scheduling reasons.

There is simply too much to work on at the moment, both technically, procedurally and culturally. Setting the tone for these communities is a delicate process, I'm sure you're aware of that, and at the current state of things adding a language barrier won't help it.

On the technical side, we've got several issues. Besides the big issue of dealing with unicode support in ruby, you have small things like prioritizing topics in a searchers native language over results in a different language. To get it right we can't just tack on Mandarin support, for example.

While I haven't read through many of your posts on multilingualism yet (run a search is the poor man's version of a proper reading list :-)), I question the usefulness of getting closer to reality on one basic point: Does having a true multilingual site improve the experience for end users? I would argue that it would be a struggle of hiding/exposing the multilingual nature of any such site.

For example, you would most certainly have to build in language filters for your users. While most people may be multilingual, none of them are _that_ multilingual. Since you reside in a more multi-lingual landscape I'm sure on average the numbers of bi- and tri-lingual people you know is higher. How many people do you know that speak 7 languages? I would bet you can count them on one hand. Without those language filters, you significantly rise the signal to noise ratio for everyone, a terrible situation.

I do see one particular advantage as multilingualism pertains to satisfaction (If the other satisfactioneers remember, I was brainstorming on this issue as early as Feb. of this year). That advantage is community-driven translation. One of the things we learned on valleyschwag was that community members jump at the chance to translate a site. There is an entire sub-culture to subtitling Anime from japan and re-distributing on the internet. By baking in translation tools, we can generate more content than each language alone could do by itself.

Those tools get real interesting when we are dealing with a real multilingual environment. Imagine a thread that gets started in english, gets translated by the community into 17 different languages and as new replies come in those in turn get translated. A community driven universal translator.

The idea of such an environment gets me all hot and bothered. I guess I just disproved my own statement about usefulness up above.

I'm curious about your ideas in this area, specifically with regards to satisfaction. How would, in your opinion, a community made up of 12 languages and 24 cultures look and operate?

First off, we're already seeing some non-English language communities adopt Satisfaction. See Eskwela [http://getsatisfaction.com/eskwela], a Filipino organization.

We are indeed very interested in this very topic, as you can see from Scott's post above. I agree with you, Steph, that this represents a huge opportunity. From my standpoint, the current lower priority of this focus has less to do with technical issues and more to do with the fact that we're in the "figuring out the business" stage. We have a lot to do to have a complete product and business model in one language before we tackle the broader challenge you describe.

But--good news--we're dealing with Internet time here, so hopefully we'll have more to discuss before too long.

Hot and bothered by human powered translation eh?

Another interesting aspect of this is that language can never fully translate, because cultures can never fully translate. So I really like the idea of this being driven by human translation, Google Translate for example, would definitely miss key context issues that need to be further explained, like the actual tone of a conversation.

A very cool extension could be built out with the API. Say there's a [translate this!] button and anyone who goes and translates a topic or a reply gets rewards similar to what we have planned for basic participation (like giving a really helpful answer). Then maybe in your own preferences you can ask to see certain languages, and we filter up those things for you. I'd love to find a way to do this that allows people from many cultures and languages to interact, not just silo one language from another like is normally the case on the web.

i agree with thor -- once we've nailed product/market fit for satisfaction, it becomes all about expansion and execution, and multilingualism is a *huge* part of that.