What the Francophones are up to

There's been a lot of interesting moving and shaking in the LibraryThing.fr community, lately, and I thought I might let the English-speaking members in on a bit of the action.

First, it was decided that the French-speaking members needed a main "general interest" forum for centralized announcements, etc. A new one could have been created, but it takes a while for membership to build up, so it would be better to optimize an existing forum for the purpose. The largest French-only forum was open to all French-speakers, according to its description, but the name of the forum was "En France" ("In France"), which may have given the wrong impression to those who didn't get as far as reading the description. Luckily, the creator of the group is still an active LT member, so he was prevailed upon to change the name of the forum to "En Français" ("In French") so that those who just give it a glance won't be mislead.

A thread in that forum gives brief descriptions of other useful Francophone forums. Some of the more notable ones are: "LibraryThing en français" (a group for those who work on translating LT into French"), "Bibliochose" (a forum for promoting LT in French), "Aide en français" (a forum for getting technical help in French, provided by bilingual members or by French-speaking members who have been around long enough to know how everything works), and Défi 999 (a French version of the 999 challenge).

Another innovation has been to actively welcome new members who are using the .fr site by leaving a brief message on their profiles after they join. (You can find a list of members who have recently joined and are using a particular subdomain LT on the Languages Zeitgeist page.) I think it's too soon to say if this action has made a difference in the number of Francophones who are joining or participating, but it'll be interesting to see how it pans out.

One of the problems with social communities below a certain size is that they won't attract new members until they reach some critical size, but they can't reach that size until they attract new members. Hopefully, being a bit more proactive in some ways will help the Francophone sub-community grow until it's large enough to be self-sustaining with less active work and it might provide a good template for other minority languages who are trying to gain a foothold.

LT member grimm has been one of the main instigators of these changes, and many others have contributed and offered feedback.

Thanks for posting this.

For those interested, here are links to the groups Katya0133 mentions. These are the links on the French-language version of the site, but change .fr to .com if you want to stay on the www.librarything.com (i.e. English-language) domain.

En Français (the general forum)

Lectures des francophones

Défi 999

Aide en français

Bibliochose

LibraryThing en français (translating group)

All French-language groups

I am sadly less fluent in French than I was when i graduated from high school (decades ago). But I still can read it pretty well. If I had more time, I would look at all these groups and see if there were any that interested me, so I could not only practice my French by reading them but perhaps also participate. For those of you who are familiar with them, are there any groups that would be interesting to people who read books in English but know some French, so that I could be something of a participant instead of just the reading equivalent of a voyeur?

Rebecca, you might want to look at The French Connection. It's a bilingual French / English group, so you won't be just a voyeur. (With enough support, I suppose there could also be a "learning French" or "practicing French" group.)

Merci beaucoup, Kaya. C'est une idee tres interessante.

De rien. :)

I'd love to get a big push going for the French site. It's the only language Abby and I sort-of speak these days. And, hey, I've got French cousins. (My grandfather married his French teacher and went on to become fluent enough that he was the liaison between the OSS and the Free French during WWII.) So why are we hotter in Denmark than France?

>So why are we hotter in Denmark than France?

Hmm. Competition, maybe? (I know there are other French-language book sites out there, but maybe there's not as much competition in Denmark or Scandinavia.)

>7 timspalding: Is that a rhetorical question, Tim?

There are two levels. On a deeper level, German and French users expect the site to work in a German environment with filtered German, French tags, reviews, sources etc. (with an optional view of the English tags, reviews etc.). Danes, Finns and the Dutch are much more used to working in an English environment.

On a more superficial level, your support for international users during the last few months has simply been terrible. Look through the bug report or recommend groups about such issues as broken search and display (the umlaut issue) or the addition of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Search without a kludge has simply been broken for German books.

I might be wrong, but I think I have not even seen a single answer or acknowledgment about these issues by a LT employee. I have even sent an email to Casey to point him to the thread but again received no reply. Your Germany-based employee might as well be AWOL. I understand that LT international has low priority but the level of non-communication has been telling.

/rant

I recommend LT to my English-speaking friends, but not to the German-speaking ones.

It may not be your fault that there is no Austrian source, but none of the German ones are up to much. (Amazon.com is bad, but the other Amazons are a lot worse. Just ghastly data.)

Umlauts and the sharp s don't work in many parts of the site. We can't even post profile comments in proper German or French and have them be understandable.

If someone has a problem in German, someone like me has to explain the work arounds or re-post it in English. I don't mind doing that, although it sometimes strains my written German - I don't use .de, and so I don't know the names for things over there, but they are unlikely to get the feel that LT is taking care of them.

As mentioned above, people from the smaller language groups are more multi-lingual, are used to working in several languages. French and German speakers may be more used to other languages than Americans tend to be, but they still expect their languages to at least work in a site that claims to be international.

I know lots of bug reports can get lost in Talk. Maybe there's need for a specific group or at least thread for international-site bugs?

Bonjour à tous
I think there are several reasons why librarything.fr is not as developed as in smaller countries.

1. Katya is right that there is more competition. We listed some there.

2. The percentage of people speaking (an reading) english is probably largely higher in small countries like Netherlands or Denmark than in larger countries like France, Italy or Germany. Librarything content regarding reviews or tags as eg. is mostly in english.
Solution could be to implement additional functions linked to language like filtering only "understandable" content and also get some more content either through users (we're working on it!) or through import (as eg why are only book descriptions from amazon.com imported and not the ones of amazon.fr or .de, etc...?

3. Nobody knows about Librarything! People know large online booksellers like amazon.fr or FNAC.com, which also propose to manage lists and reviews. True social sites not selling books like LT are not so well-known however. I think LT should try to cut a deal with a large online / real life bookseller: Let them include links to LT on their site or distribute leaflets in the stores, etc...but what kind of service could LT offer them ?

4. Additionnally, number of french sources is just ridiculous compared to any other country...

I'd not be as hard as jcbrunner but I was also disappointed when suddenly the french characters stopped working on profile messages on about december, 15th. I sent Tim a mail on January, 4th and we got no answer and no fix...

I'd be glad to provide any help to the LT team to further develop the site presence in France.

>4 Katya0133:. Additionnally, number of french sources is just ridiculous compared to any other country...

Yeah. I wish it were better. French libraries don't have open interfaces.

>10 MarthaJeanne:. If someone has a problem in German, someone like me has to explain the work arounds or re-post it in English. I don't mind doing that, although it sometimes strains my written German - I don't use .de, and so I don't know the names for things over there, but they are unlikely to get the feel that LT is taking care of them.

I think that there will always have to be a small group of users who are bilingual in English for the the non-English sites to function, both to help bring attention to language-specific bugs, and to make non-English speakers aware of workarounds and general news (say, from the blog).

But this doesn't have to be a major Achilles' heel so long as the main Powers That Be respond to these issues when they come up.

But we still haven't had any answer about when we can write French and German properly on our profile comments again. The sources may be beyond LT's control, but that isn't, and it is a major problem if Tim wants non-English users. We haven't even had an aknowledgment that they are aware of the problem.

>15 MarthaJeanne:

Oh, I completely agree. That's exactly the kind of problem that does need to be addressed in a timely fashion.

Ditto this problem: the absence of amazon.fr on the import page:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/38656#642944

#15: But we still haven't had any answer about when we can write French and German properly on our profile comments again. (...) We haven't even had an aknowledgment that they are aware of the problem. I would like to add another gentle reminder here, just to make it clear again that the national character problem appeared short before Christmas. Comments on profile pages were absolutely legible before, whether they contained é, ü, ç or not.

>7 timspalding:

Calepin says:

Si je peux me permettre, je pense qu'il persiste dans le LibraryThing français encore un peu trop de traces du LibraryThing anglais. Ainsi, les recherches sur amazon.com par défaut au lieu de amazon.fr (avec des résultats du genre L'élégance du hérisson "by" Muriel Barbery), les messages d'erreur parfois en anglais, le LibraryThing Local qui pointe sur les Etats-Unis si l'adresse du profil n'est pas renseignée, le "loading" à droite de ce message quand je saisis des termes entres crochets, le "undefined" qui apparaît lorsque l'on clique sur "montrer l'édition rapide", les critiques des membres, essentiellement en anglais (pour l'élégance du hérisson, les premières critiques affichées sur la page de l'ouvrage sont toutes en anglais, un comble...), etc. Des petites choses, certes, mais qui peuvent suffire à faire fuir les allergiques à l'anglais (dont je ne suis pas, mais j'en connais !) ...

J'édite aussitôt mon message, pour ajouter... l'heure, qui n'est apparemment pas au bon fuseau horaire par défaut : mon message est daté d'aujourd'hui 4:31pm au lieu de 22h31... ;)

My translation:

"If I may, I think that there are still a bit too many traces of English LT in French LT. Thus, searches on Amazon.com by default instead of searches on Amazon.fr (with results of the type L'élégance du hérisson "by" Muriel Barbery), error messages in English, LT local points to the US if the profile address isn't filled out, the "loading" to the right of this message when key in a word between brackets, the "undefined" which appears when one clicks on "montrer l'édition rapide"*, the member reviews which are essentially in English, (for L'élégance du hérisson, the first reviews that appear on the work page are all in English), etc. Small things, to be sure, but which can drive away those who are allergic to English (of which I am not one, but I know some!) ...

I'm also also editing this message to add . . . the time, which isn't in the right time zone by default : my message is dated today at 4:31 pm instead of 22h31. ... ;)"

*I don't actually know what section of the site this refers to.

I think that's probably the "show quick edit" link on the Add Books page.

jbetinelli says:

Je ne pense pas que les restes non-traduits soient des obstacles. J'imagine que l'utilisateur moyen de LT.fr est plutôt littéraire et parle anglais sans trop de soucis.

Ce que j'aimerais voir pour la partie francophone, ce sont des nuages de mot-clés et d'auteurs spécifiques aux inscrits .fr

My translation:

I don't think that the rest of the untranslated areas are obstacles. I imagine that the average user of LT.fr is more literary and speaks English without much worry.

What I'd like to see for the French side are author and tag clouds specific to .fr members.

19> Katya, you might point out to Calepin that the time zone isn't adjusted for anyone, it's only right for East Coast US - I'm on the West Coast of the US, so it's three hours later than my time.

The rest, I agree, would be a pain. Maybe Tim & Co can spend some time on other language bits once Collections is out (and all of us are tied up sorting out our catalogs, so we don't have time to ask for more stuff!).

I think I remember something from Tim that the comments were fixed - is that true, or was I imagining things? That was a major problem.

I just want to send my good wishes to Katya0133 and friends, I hope you are successful in attracting active and interesting members.

We did something similar here in Seattle, WA to start a book club by contacting LT members who live locally. We've been meeting for 7 or 8 months now. It worked for us so I hope it works for you too!

>22 jjmcgaffey:

Thanks for pointing that out about the time zones. (I only recently learned that, myself — after years of living in the west, I've apparently become an east coast snob!)

And, yes the comments problem has been fixed.