I've always had a major interest in language and linguistics, which in fact sometimes forms into an obsession. Now that I have become an editor, and have really started to sift through pages on the TASVideos site, I'm starting to notice more than ever that many pages do have a version of that page in another language (usually Russian, for some reason); however, despite that, there are so few languages represented.
This I see as something that needs to be seriously looked at. The reason? Well, as
http://tasvideos.org/WelcomeToTASVideos.html says, there are over 100,000 unique visitors to this site every month, which adds up to over a million (presumably) every year. A lot of people who will come to this site will prefer to read site pages in another language (probably because English is not their native language).
Wikipedia and Wiktionary are two sites other than TASVideos in which I've been long-term actively involved. There are literally hundreds of language-versions of Wikipedia (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias for all of them) and a similarly large amount of language versions of Wiktionary.
Personally, in all the time I've been seeing TASers, etc., I've come across TASers that I knew spoke any of the following languages natively:
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
English (obviously)
Español (Spanish)
Français (French)
한국어 (Korean)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Italiano (Italian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
日本語 (Japanese)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Tagalog (main language of the Philippines)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Українська (Ukrainian)
中文 (Chinese)
And it's not over. If we really have over a million visitors to this site every day, I have no doubt in my mind that at least a few people if not many who natively speak any of the following languages below visit this site (look them up on Wikipedia if you're unfamiliar with any of them):
Afrikaans (Afrikaans)
العربية (Arabic)
Azərbaycanca (Azerbaijani)
Беларуская (Belarusian)
Català (Catalan)
Čeština (Czech)
Cymraeg (Welsh)
Eesti (Estonian)
فارسی (Persian)
Հայերեն (Armenian)
Gaeilge (Irish)
हिन्दी (Hindi)
Íslenska (Icelandic)
ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada)
עברית (Hebrew)
ქართული (Georgian)
Қазақша (Kazakh)
Kiswahili (Swahili)
Latviešu (Latvian)
Lëtzebuergesch (Luxembourgish)
Lietuvių (Lithuanian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Македонски (Macedonian)
Монгол (Mongolian)
Norsk (Norwegian [bokmal/nynorsk])
Oʻzbekcha/ўзбекча (Uzbek)
ភាសាខ្មែរ (Khmer)
Română (Romanian)
Shqip (Albanian)
Sicilianu (Sicilian)
Slovenčina (Slovak)
Slovenščina (Slovene)
Srpskohrvatski (Serbo-Croatian), which includes all its dialects that are sometimes confused to be separate languages: Bosanski (Bosnian), Hrvatski (Croatian), Srpski (Serbian)
ไทย (Thai)
Türkmençe (Turkmen)
God I just LOVE long lists of languages. I don't know why; I guess it's just my thing.
Additionally, some cool, but not really useful I suppose, ones would be:
Esperanto
Latina (Latin)
Anyway, there are some that I haven't mentioned, but you get the idea. A
lot of people speaking a
lot of different languages come here every month.
Now, I don't claim to specialize in foreign languages, so I can't do the translations alone. There are quite a few languages besides English that I can speak enough to have casual conversations and can do a few other things with them, but I don't know any of said languages well enough to translate complete documents while knowing I will not make translation errors and grammatical mistakes. There are a lot of resources I have at my disposal for translation: Wiktionary has
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Translation_requests , where you can literally ask for a passage to be translated and someone who is knowledgable will come and translate it (though this doesn't ALWAYS work). Or, as I've mentioned above, this community is linguistically diverse; I can ask someone who speaks a certain language
and knows the context of TASing to translate some of the pages here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction Wikipedia gives 98 languages for their site introduction, while
http://tasvideos.org/WelcomeToTASVideos.html we only give two for ours (and by the way, this is the most amount of languages for any given page I've seen on the site thus far). Now I'm not saying we absolutely have to provide a thousand languages for every page, but I just feel like there should be more attention paid towards page translation.
So I'm asking for your help. Any users who speak any foreign languages and feel comfortable translating long passages without error into your language(s), please help me to translate several important pages on the site, including all the introductory and guidelines/rules pages. Also, during this movement I may start getting translations and may add a few pages at a time, just to give you a heads up (but I will let someone know every time beforehand if I do).
By doing all of this, we will help our content to be better understood by all audiences. Thank you in advance.