Hi,
robb, Escorpiom, I understand perfectly your point. In fact our initial approach, when we were known as eBox, was that IT guys do (or should) understand English and thus we would use English as the only official language. However, this turned out to be a mistake: although Zentyal is used in several high-tech environments by very experienced IT professionals, a large part of its user base belongs to part-time sysadmins, small business managers, freelances, consultants, students and home users. These people, if they come from a non-English speaking country, do not use English on a daily basis and many do not feel confident enough to ask for support in a different language than their own mother tongue.
So, with our initial approach we found out that many users were left out and that we should consider localization as an important issue. We received several requests to open up a Spanish-language board, and then jquintao offered his help to be Portuguese-board moderator. These boards have proved to be very useful to provide support for non-English speakers. However, the main language is still English and most of the posts are written in this language.
Recently,
mmullenders offered to start a Zentyal Users Group in the Netherlands, which I believe could be a great use for language-specific boards.
In summary, I think having language-specific boards is positive for the project for two reasons:
1) They allow us to expand our user base to those who have difficulties in communicating in English.
2) Users always have the alternative of starting their own Zentyal language-specific forum elsewhere instead of this forum, and that would not be good for the project.
I agree it is challenging to keep several languages in the forum and that they might look like isolated islands, but I also believe it is the best approach. Moreover, we can give more use to these boards as a communication channel for local users groups or for translation teams. Anyway, this is just my opinion and I am open to get convinced during the discussion