[Communities itself] Make certain foreign-language forums easier to find
The English-language page "Other Languages", https://community.familysearch.org/en/categories/other-languages , lists forums intended for discussion in the following languages:
- Danish
- Norwegian
- Swedish
- Dutch
- Czech
- Hungarian
- Romanian
- Finnish
- Polish
However, there are also entire separate Communities for certain other languages, including
- https://community.familysearch.org/es/ for Spanish
- https://community.familysearch.org/de/ for German
- https://community.familysearch.org/fr/ for French
- https://community.familysearch.org/pt/ for Portuguese
- https://community.familysearch.org/ko for Korean
If I change my FamilySearch interface language to Spanish, click on the "Ayuda" (Help) icon, and follow the link "Comunidad" (Communities), that takes me to the Spanish community; but there doesn't seem to be any way for a user who has limited English proficiency, but would ask a better question in his or her native language out of those big ones, to discover that those communities exist by browsing the "Other Languages" section of the English community.
And if I try to visit https://community.familysearch.org/ro/ , it just gives me a "Page Not Found" error; it seems like a redirect to https://community.familysearch.org/en/categories/romana would be more helpful to someone trying to go there. Likewise for the other "Other Languages".
Comments
-
The control for going to the other language subcommunities is up at the top, on the globe icon.
I think the assumption is that on the main site, people will have the interface language set to their preferred language of communication. The "Community" link (or its equivalent) on the Help drop-down goes to the German subcommunity if I set the interface to Deutsch, and to the Other Languages category if I set it to Magyar.
Of course, that underlying assumption about the interface language is ...often false. For example, my preferred language of communication changes depending on context and audience -- and I leave the main-page interface on English, because getting annoyed at not-quite-right translations is not a good use of my time and energy.
I have no idea how or if links would work to the subcommunities from the Other Languages category: listing them all alphabetically would be confusing, because some of them are subcommunities, while others are just subcategories. Putting instructions to check the globe icon is also problematic, because the whole point is that it's for people who don't know English, so then you'd need instructions about it in nine different languages... Ugh. I can definitely see why it's currently set up the way it is, given the constraints/inconsistency.
1
