Advance Steel questions in French

[patrick.emin]

Hi, we had quite a few Advance Steel questions lately on our French forum. And not enough resources from the community to answer them (in French). If you can read and write French , I would appreciate your help 😉

Thanks: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/annonces-de-la-communaute/bd-p/335

[acbsdesign]

@patrick.emin 

It is probably not a bad idea for the users in your forum to learn English, some 3.5-5.5K words are more than enough to communicate.

If the main source is in another language, then we have to adjust ourselves in order to get what we are looking for. 

From age 10 to 18 I learned German every single day, self-learner, and officially at school, ended up living and working in an English-speaking world. This is life. 

So many knowledgeable users have to use a second language to be able to work and support a family.

I would say most of the users here in this forum.

The subject may be sensitive for some, this is just my opinion and has nothing to do with PSG or anything around it.

It is 2021, and to "constrain" ourselves to a single language does not seem right.

[patrick.emin]

@acbsdesign 

Thank you for your comments. I am certainly the first to encourage our users to learn English, and your advice is most welcome. Great progress has been made in this area in the French population, and I'm not just talking about Autodesk. We happen to have French language forums, as do other officially supported Autodesk languages, and Autodesk software is generally available in those languages.

It is important to distinguish the language of the interface from the language used to clearly express a problem. If it is sufficient to have a basic knowledge to use a software in English, for a French-speaking person, it becomes much more difficult to explain clearly and in detail without equivocation a problem that one encounters with this software in a language that is not his mother tongue.

It is quite common to see questions or answers that have obviously been translated by machine translation software, and the language of CAD is not a natural language for either Google or Microsoft, this is obvious! (Although Deepl does a much better job).

That's why I was making this call, let's not forget that some of our users expressing themselves on the English forums are also able to express themselves in another language, I'm thinking in particular of our friends from Quebec whom I thank in advance if they can help us on our French forum.

[bigcarl5000kg]

Hi @patrick.emin ,

I understand your feelings very well, I am personally in a position to use Advance Steel in German. Given the available Autodesk forums and their quality, I opted for some international forum. That is why I also have an English language pack for each Autodesk product, because professional terms and especially various descriptions could be incompatible with my mother version / direct translation may not have the required meaning in another language. I think that with the increasing linguistic knowledge, it will be possible for me, completely in the future, to completely forget about the partially comparison in the English version.

In several English Autodesk forums, I noticed a lot of people who were once active only in another (home) language version and were forced / transferred voluntarily to the English version - it doesn't matter why. There are even bilingual questions in this forum - I don't see any problem at all. The same can be applied by anyone who feels addressed and answered. And for a foreign language user, possibly the opportunity to learn something 😉.

I see some other problem here - a lot of users do not / can't get basic training, which would allow them to more easily improve their skills and abilities, if not to acquire all the only overlooked basic information. In my eyes, this is a major obstacle to a quality base for these users.

I learn it on the way, just like a small child ... and if I can use a translator for it, it can definitely entertain someone 😀.

[patrick.emin]

@bigcarl5000kg Agreed with your comments. A small (not small actualy!) point not to oversee though: mixing languages in one forum is not a good practice, not good for our "human" readers and not good for Google. We, community managers, are instructed to separate languages and non English posts should go only to the international  section.