Dhamma forums in French (& other languages)?

Most of the time you wouldn’t know if people are LGBTQI (gosh, can we make that “non-binary”, far more comprehensive and easier to pronounce).

PS. As you can see from my Gender Identification, I’m neither! :vulcan_salute:

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I do not understand the logic of this.

That’s the point. Unless we’ve suffered these kinds of discrimination, we don’t know how it works, and how to deal with things. I’ve made it my business to try to learn and understand these problems for many years, and there’s still a lot I don’t know.

I know that as a Sri Lankan you will have experienced racism in ways that I can’t understand, and I would always listen to your experience in that area. But the way that discrimination manifests is different in different contexts, so we need to support the voices of those people who have actually experienced it.

Honestly, if you’re not persuaded, I doubt if there’s much I can do or say to change your mind. But if you take my suggestion on good faith, I believe that you will soon see the practical effects and benefits.

(I might add that not all of our moderators agree with the woman-only policy.)

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As a Vulcan, shouldn’t you be able to pronounce LGBTQI? Or LGBTQIA it probably should be.

Anyway, I’m just trying to keep up, labels change all the time!

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I understand this. But your logic does not make sense.
Your proposed action itself is discriminatory.
I do not down play the suffering of LGBTQI, but there is another long list.
That include women, men, black people, red people, yellow people, Jews, Muslims etc. children, disable people, old people, you name it.

we need to support the voices of those people who have actually experienced it.>

We might win the battle but lose the war perhaps we create a new war. See what happened in Palestine.

Back to the topic.

If those kinds of people were regularly subject to abuse, then it would make sense to include them. And in some cases, they are, and they should be included. But in a Dhamma forum, it’s relatively unlikely that they would be the focus of abuse; or in some cases, such as Muslims, it would be hard to find someone to participate. Nevertheless, if a case of such abuse came up, and it was not easy to resolve, I would recommend contacting someone from the relevant community to ask for their advice.

Making the moderators women is a practical, doable step that goes some way to protecting one of the largest groups of people who are subject to discrimination.

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Wow, I only see this thread today, I am a native French speaker and would be very interested to contribute to this as well. I’ll reach out to my French speaking dhamma friends to see if there’s more interest.

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Bhante @sujato,

Do you think that the moderation of a French instance of Discourse would be too much work for one person initially, considering the low volume of activity this would trigger at first. This would hopefully change and calls for more moderators could be made later if necessary?

I would volunteer for that, including the admin work. Or is this totally unrealistic?

Noé

I think this is more feasible. It’s better to have an universal translator on a common forum, than to split into many languages, small enclaves, like the time of the babel (not literal usage, just as metaphor).

Splitting into other smaller groups of various languages, they would miss out the input of many Venerables here. They would miss out on the many topics we already discussed, and perhaps they might get linked to the English discussion anyway when that topic comes up, which then they would have to do google translate if they prefer to read in their native languages.

Hello Bhante @NgXinZhao,

Yes, I see what you mean. Good point!

This solution uses Google Translate. I don’t know if it improved since I last used it but I find it of poor quality sometimes. I have much better results with DeepL for instance, but I don’t know if DeepL is useable for this purpose, I would need to read their doc. On the other hand, they have a Chrome extension which works well. Also, if a translation solution were implemented, should people then be invited to express themselves in their native language?

Now I just found a similar solution, as a plugin for Discourse. It also uses Google Translate though. And there are some conversations here and here about DeepL integration with Discourse.

But to come back to your first point, maybe a section in the common forum destined to other linguistic communities could be an alernative. This would avoid additional technical work, only moderation would be required, keeping all insightful discussions within one forum so everything is at the disposal of everyone. Just a thought. :slight_smile:

:pray: Noé