[Strawbale]so many lists and still we need more

[asbn]

Dear Chug and Mark and...

I would have said this in another tone, if it were my own language. I
remember the first ESBN Gathering in Denmark, where I stumbled and David
Eisenberg helped me in finding all those special words...

And I remember the Gathering in Austria, where most of the people were
German, Austrian, Czech, Swiss, Hungarian and just a few American (2) or
English. Most of them spoke german and english, but we had to talk in
english, because Americans only speak english. Much of what we wanted to say
or explain seemed to be a little simple, because our english was simple (the
tourist´s english). I once tried to find a building-specialized dictionary,
I didn´t find one in Vienna (even not in internet - try to translate any
text from german/italian/french to english in Sistrain or other tools, a
funny thing.).

Now I´m used to it, even Austrian congresses are in english. And I´m used to
understand only the half of specialised discussions.
But: I learned english in school, not everyone does. Swiss don´t (they have
three languages to learn), many Italian didn´t, many French didn´t...

We all agree, that our knowledge is our future, that the innovation-level of
a country and its people is proportional to its international recognition
and its wealth ("innovation is the motor of business and trade").

What is the solution in a globalized world and market? Better learn english?
I like the ideas of globalized acting but regionalized culture. Our
innovations are mostly a result of our own regional culture and acting, of
our own regional history. And in the last time we find a way back to this
culture, e.g in movies and music besides Hollywood and/or mainstream.

We once spoke about one European website with all the informations about
strawbalebuilding in all the languages spoken in EU. But this is hard work,
the work to translate texts (not automatically, this is impossible), even
when you personally are not interested or involved in. So we decided to
connect the regional network-homepages, tried to establish
strawbale-networks in each European language or country.
 
But what happened. I have my german (or should I say austrian) site, Dirk
and Fasba do the german, you and Barbara (...) do the english, Lars, Jan and
Folkecenter do the danish, René does the dutch, André and Coralie do the
french, Attila does the hungarian,... Italian, spanish, slovenian and many
other are still missing.

But: René is the only one using his native language AND english. There is
not one of us on this list or in our network, I think, who is able to read
or even navigate through all this network-sites and get the newest
informations/innovations (even from this list). I think, this is the
problem. But I don´t know an answer except having much money to let do this
work, maybe a European project, supported by the EU...

Best wishes,
Herbert Gruber


Mark wrote

> Chug -
> 
> Sounds good in theory, but my experience of trying to use online
> translation facilities for Danish-English translation last summer was
> pretty miserable.  In fact, worse than useless - I couldn't find a
> facility that could produce translations that made any sense, and in any
> case all the key technical words weren't in the online dictionary...  So
> now I'd be a bit cautious about automatic translation.
> 
> Something that might help, though,  is a multilingual glossary of
> technical terms.
> 
> I have a lot of sympathy with you Herbert (and everyone else for whom
> English isn't their first language) - if I had to write everything in
> German, I could do it but it would take ages.  And I also find it deeply
> frustrating always having to convert US data into international units if
> I want any quantitative information.
> 
> Maybe those of us who are a "bridge" between different strawbale lists
> should make a point of passing on stuff from one list to another if we
> think it is of particular interest.
> 
> Mark
> 
> 
> 
> Chug. wrote:
> 
>> Hi Herbert
>> 
>> it seems the world has adopted our english language but not our system of
>> measurement, and just to clarify, we in the UK use the
>> same metric system you do and have done for over 30 years now.
>> I am not going to post anymore about the SB lists topic after this post...I
>> promise - honest, but it seems there are plenty of lists
>> around the world providing good info for SBers, although it seems not many
>> people know about all of them,
>> and as I said previously it can take a lot of time trying to keep up with all
>> of them(especially with this list now getting used
>> more) and a lot of the time topics are repeated from one list to the another,
>> especially newbie questions, so for me personally less
>> would be better, but I am forgetting that english is my native language so
>> it's easy for me to keep up. Could the answer be one list
>> but with automatic translation into your preferred language?......Now theres
>> a technical challenge for you computer geeks!
>> 
>> 
>> bale on
>> Chug
>> chug at strawbale-building....uk
>> http://www.strawbale-building.co.uk/