I sometimes end up wanting to comment in discussions where English is not the dominant language, most frequently Mexico or the French-speaking part of Canada, occasionally elsewhere in the world. In these areas, nearly all discussions on the site will be in other languages. I can usually read and wr…

You can see a list of curators or in some cases users fluent in certain languages here who can help if needed : https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/curator+guide#languages If you are comfortable communicating in a particular language, I’d encourage to add, or request your name be added to the list.

Thanks much, lots of great discussion in that thread.

Thanks! I’ll have to think about that, I’m pretty comfortable in Spanish and German, especially when talking about plants in that I know at least a bit of plant names and terminology in both languages. I might want to get more comfortable though before adding myself to a list.

I don’t think using online translators is an appropriate way to go unless you know something about that language, you can’t see how good translation is. As it’s an international platform everyone has the right to speak their language, English is not worse than any other.

Better to use a language where you are confident of saying what you want to - and let them translate. And vice versa - I am happy to use an online translator for your language when I don’t know it.

I understand most of the contributions in English quite well. But to be really sure, I have to translate the English, Spanish, Italian and Russian posts with an online translator. When replying to visitors with these languages, I am forced to translate my German contributions into English. Since I d…

Thanks to the EU, online translation has a huge resource of back to back translation to use, for those languages. Move away from the EU to a language like Afrikaans and the machine translation wanders far away from either meaning or meaningful.

[image] DianaStuder: Move away from the EU to a language like Afrikaans and the machine translation wanders far away from either meaning or meaningful. And yet Afrikaans is considered to be a language of European origin, a direct descendant of Dutch.

[image] rbr20: I then have translated the received English text back to German. So I can see whether my statements are still true. Back when Online translators were new, I tried to translate “wipe up the counter tops” into Spanish. When I translated it back into english, the result was “highl…

Languages to Use in Discussions in non-English Speaking Regions?

General

upupa-epops October 21, 2020, 5:35pm 3

There was this thread discussing how to deal with that: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/ideas-on-best-ways-to-engage-in-multilingual-conversations/8824

Topic		Replies	Views
Ideas on best ways to engage in multilingual conversations General	16	2627	October 31, 2020
What languages do you write comments in when identifying? General	43	1113	November 20, 2025
My mother tongue and English (indicating your preferred language in your user profile) General	30	1882	October 17, 2023
Ettiquette for IDing Species Across Borders and Languages General	22	623	February 13, 2026
Boilerplate responses in other languages Feature Requests	2	816	July 10, 2019

Languages to Use in Discussions in non-English Speaking Regions?

Related topics