Official international support?

Been Told

Well-known member
A discussion about international support and such has started in one of the German threads here. Now we know from Scott (vB-Germany) that he is contractually bound to IB and cannot offer official German distribution of xenForo.

So I guess my question is: what are the plans in regards to international customers?
There are several forum owners out there who are willing to pay for software, but only if they can get support for it in their language. And I think that that is a market xenForo cannot (and probably will not want to) ignore.

I know from what Kier said that crowd sourcing will be used to create translation of xenForo.
But I believe that much more needs to be done in order to really have a foot in the several international markets.
Obviously a setup like vBulletin has with vBulletin Germany is not easy to do. Otherwise it would not be the only such partnership out there.
Especially international ticket support might be a bit tricky (but not impossible).
Official international forums could be created (and controlled) by xenForo and run by international customers who can help support the software in their language. It's not as good as international ticket support, but better than nothing. However, those communities would need to be close to xenForo.
What I mean is, they should be more than just "fan forums" and such.
Once the translations are created, maybe those spin-off forums could be entrusted with maintaining those language files.

Another option would probably be international forums right here on xenForo.com. But in the long run, I don't think that would suffice. Plus, we'd still be getting complaints about non-English threads/posts popping up in "what's new". (Wow, how terrible.)

I don't think there would be any shortage of people wanting to do international support. No, it may not be the same quality of support you would get from paid staff (like at vB-Germany). But again, better than nothing.

So, to make a long story short:
What are your plans with regards to international customers and their place on xenForo?
 
Scott can always quit vBG and sell it back to IB, and wait out his non compete claus (if he actually has one).
:)
Or he can just create a new Ltd. company in England (costs around €200-300) and just do it through that. :D
But seriously though - I don't think that'll happen.
I do think that Scott would like to work with Kier, Mike and Ashley in the same way he worked with Jelsoft. But giving up vB-Germany in favor of any xenForo-Germany would be a big step. One that would earn my eternal respect of course.
 
thanks BT for this thread. i'm really and totally interested in this ... what i wanna do is an 'official' (or acknowledged) italian support and maybe we can also sell the XF for the italian customers.

anyway, just wait Ashley, maybe he can tell us more about this.
 
Only Scott knows and can say what his situation is.
The short answer is that, currently, we do not have a clear strategy about how this will or could work! Yes, there are possibilities...

We understand that support in one's native language is very important. Our intention is to have crowd sourced translations available from xenforo.com so that initially, non English versions will be available. We anticipate that XenForo users will create forums to support those using different languages and as these sites develop, they, and we, will be better able to knowledgeably decide the way forward.
 
The idea is very good, but I don't think we got high quality by crowd sourced translation
I think there is a risk of producing low-quality translations, but this can be mitigated. The single most important thing when translating a user interface is translating the same terms consistently. For example, "discussion" may be translated as different words—thread, discussion, topic, etc—in different parts of the system if we don't pay attention to consistency. This is what ruins a translation. The solution is first to have adequate communication and consensus among the people working on the translation in terms of which words, phrases, and forms of address are going to be used in the target language to translate the English counterparts. The second mitigating factor would be the ability to easily search phrases to ensure consistent translations—maybe even some sort of auto-search while translating a given phrase. Taking the "discussion" example again, you would search for all previously-translated phrases containing the term "discussion" and see how they were translated, so that you can translate the current phrase containing "discussion" in a similar fashion.
 
I think there is a risk of producing low-quality translations, but this can be mitigated. The single most important thing when translating a user interface is translating the same terms consistently. For example, "discussion" may be translated as different words—thread, discussion, topic, etc—in different parts of the system if we don't pay attention to consistency. This is what ruins a translation. The solution is first to have adequate communication and consensus among the people working on the translation in terms of which words, phrases, and forms of address are going to be used in the target language to translate the English counterparts. The second mitigating factor would be the ability to easily search phrases to ensure consistent translations—maybe even some sort of auto-search while translating a given phrase. Taking the "discussion" example again, you would search for all previously-translated phrases containing the term "discussion" and see how they were translated, so that you can translate the current phrase containing "discussion" in a similar fashion.
i totally agree with you Enigma. but i think this issue can be avoided easily ... just make the translations by 'words' and not by 'phrases' ...
 
Or he can just create a new Ltd. company in England (costs around €200-300) and just do it through that. :D
But seriously though - I don't think that'll happen.
I do think that Scott would like to work with Kier, Mike and Ashley in the same way he worked with Jelsoft. But giving up vB-Germany in favor of any xenForo-Germany would be a big step. One that would earn my eternal respect of course.

sounds like "Scott" is the only guy in the world who speaks both english and german ? :p
 
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