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[Avimimus]

We live in a world with many languages and many countries. On this forum we're all united by our love of aviation history.

We also live in an era were good machine translation is making it possible for communication across languages. If anyone has done extensive research on WWII or Cold War aviation - you will have encounter Cyrillic before. It is frankly, a bit irrational to be afraid of other languages.

It isn't 'pollution' to encounter another language. Using such language may lead to a permanent ban under rule 8.

The existence of other languages is an inconvenience at most - but more often it is an opportunity to learn something. I know some of you don't come from as multicultural a country as my own so it might seem strange, but the fact is that the Internet is multicultural. We need to get used to that fact.

 

 

[LuftManu]

Hello everyone. As Avimimus has said, we are in a multicultural forum and participation is optional.

Just like in the Rise of Flight forum, we now share this space with other languages, and it has never been so easy to communicate.

Between automatic translators and people who also make the effort to translate certain things into English, I believe this is a great opportunity for us to communicate with more people.

Previously, the Russian IL-2 forum had many resources that were often completely unknown in the English forum.

Now this is changing, and we can all share the same home.

A week ago, I made an introduction in the Russian forum using a translator, and although cultural nuances are not always conveyed, I was able to communicate with fellow members.

This means that everyone can do so if they wish, and is free to communicate with whomever they like.

Pollution is a strong word for seeing threads in another language or languages, C'mon. 

[Leifr]

Quote

8. Inciting ethnic hatred and Nazism and racist statements will result in a permanent ban of the offending user account and deletion of the posts and threads created by this user account.

Really? That's a bit of a stretch Avimimus. Strong word, and on retrospect the wrong one - call it spending the day in London on work, and getting home short on eloquence. 

The issue that I have, really, is precedent. We had almost fifteen years of strict English-only chatter to the point where even a single post was thrown in the sin bin and the poster politely reminded that, on the whole, it is an English-speaking forum. Language groups are free to use their own languages contained within the appropriate language forums - we have them listed on the forum, otherwise what's the point? If this is so, we may as well scrap them and just go all in.

[AEthelraedUnraed]

15 minutes ago, Avimimus said:

We live in a world with many languages and many countries. On this forum we're all united by our love of aviation history.

We also live in an era were good machine translation is making it possible for communication across languages. If anyone has done extensive research on WWII or Cold War aviation - you will have encounter Cyrillic before. It is frankly, a bit irrational to be afraid of other languages.

It isn't 'pollution' to encounter another language. Using such language may lead to a permanent ban under rule 8.

The existence of other languages is an inconvenience at most - but more often it is an opportunity to learn something. I know some of you don't come from as multicultural a country as my own so it might seem strange, but the fact is that the Internet is multicultural. We need to get used to that fact.

You're completely misquoting Leifr's and my use of the word "pollute". Neither of us is saying that Russian or any other language is pollution; what we're saying is that it pollutes a forum that before had readable threads and posts, with unreadable ones. Also the suggestion that I'm afraid of other languages is very strange at the least, and to be honest I feel a bit offended by it. English isn't my own native language at all - it's Dutch. Besides Dutch and English I also speak conversational level German, can read French and a bit of Danish, Latin and Old Norse, and am familiar with the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets.

However whether you like it or not - and I cannot say that I do particularly like English - it's the de facto Lingua Franca of the world. Many people around the world have at least a rudimentary understanding of English, especially those rich enough to buy IL2 and the required hardware.

As I said, there are very good reasons not to use machine translation, that you Admins still haven't addressed. You're effectively demanding the majority of people who understand English - many of them as a second or third language - to give up their privacy and increase their power consumption just so that those people who only know their own language don't need to translate it themselves. You're effectively punishing those people who did take the trouble of learning a second language at the expense of those who didn't.

I'm not against having a Russian (or whatever language) version of the same forum, but then this translation should be done on your side. Since you control the forum backend, you have the ability to automatically translate all posts in a secure and optimised way. Implement this as a service and an example to forums worldwide, rather than the annoying semi-functional mess it is now.

[BrotKasting]

52 minutes ago, Avimimus said:

"...It is frankly, a bit irrational to be afraid of other languages..."

Angst vor anderen Sprachen habe ich nicht. Finde ich super, dass ich auch auf Deutsch schreiben kann. Fragt sich nur, ob andere Forumsbesucher das auch so toll finden und ob sie sich wirklich die Mühe machen, meinen Text mit Google zu übersetzen. Und dieses Ergebnis möchte ich gar nicht erst sehen.

Ganz ehrlich? Sich auf eine weit verbreitete Sprache zu beschränken, hat durchaus Vorteile. Und es eint die Community.

[Avimimus]

21 minutes ago, Leifr said:

Really? That's a bit of a stretch Avimimus. Strong word, and on retrospect the wrong one - call it spending the day in London on work, and getting home short on eloquence. 

The issue that I have, really, is precedent. We had almost fifteen years of strict English-only chatter to the point where even a single post was thrown in the sin bin and the poster politely reminded that, on the whole, it is an English-speaking forum. Language groups are free to use their own languages contained within the appropriate language forums - we have them listed on the forum, otherwise what's the point? If this is so, we may as well scrap them and just go all in.

  

16 minutes ago, AEthelraedUnraed said:

You're completely misquoting Leifr's and my use of the word "pollute". Neither of us is saying that Russian or any other language is pollution; what we're saying is that it pollutes a forum that before had readable threads and posts, with unreadable ones. Also the suggestion that I'm afraid of other languages is very strange at the least, and to be honest I feel a bit offended by it. English isn't my own native language at all - it's Dutch. Besides Dutch and English I also speak conversational level German, can read French and a bit of Danish, Latin and Old Norse, and am familiar with the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets.

However whether you like it or not - and I cannot say that I do particularly like English - it's the de facto Lingua Franca of the world. Many people around the world have at least a rudimentary understanding of English, especially those rich enough to buy IL2 and the required hardware.

As I said, there are very good reasons not to use machine translation, that you Admins still haven't addressed. You're effectively demanding the majority of people who understand English - many of them as a second or third language - to give up their privacy and increase their power consumption just so that those people who only know their own language don't need to translate it themselves. You're effectively punishing those people who did take the trouble of learning a second language at the expense of those who didn't.

I'm not against having a Russian (or whatever language) version of the same forum, but then this translation should be done on your side. Since you control the forum backend, you have the ability to automatically translate all posts in a secure and optimised way. Implement this as a service and an example to forums worldwide, rather than the annoying semi-functional mess it is now.

 

When put that way the proposal for single language forums is more reasonable. I'll grant that.

We don't want to discourage feedback about the forums - but we also want to make sure everyone feels welcome. We live in an era where it feels like countries are pulling back from each other, we want this forum to be a place which brings people together in a sense of International co-operation in the remembrance of history.

Please be careful about your word use with regard to other people. If we do see anything that seems to be encouraging inter-ethnic intolerance we'll need to come down on it hard. So avoid generalising about entire countries, languages, or ethnic groups.

Words like 'pollution' are inappropriate ways to describe people mixing languages, as it does imply a concept of linguistic or ethnolinguistic purity being imposed on others.

[SARFlytitus]

In my humble opinion, it's not a matter of polluting a few posts or entire threads. Regardless of the poster's culture/nationality/native language, the English language (like it or not) is what unites communities, allows them to communicate and exchange information. Furthermore, to stay on the strictly aeronautical theme, it ensures that global air traffic is not a jumble of chaos and misunderstandings. As for me, in all these years as a frequent visitor to international forums, being somehow forced to interact in a language that isn't my own but is used more or less fluently by the rest of the world has allowed me to perfect my understanding and allow me to collaborate with people who share my passions, whether in Oslo, Crete, Moscow, Barcelona, or wherever. In short, it has brought me closer to the rest of humanity, I who live on a small island in the middle of the Mediterranean...

Ciao

 

По моему скромному мнению, дело не в том, чтобы засорять несколько постов или целые треды. Независимо от культуры, национальности или родного языка автора, английский язык (нравится он вам или нет) объединяет сообщества, позволяет им общаться и обмениваться информацией. Более того, если говорить о чисто авиационной теме, он гарантирует, что мировое воздушное сообщение не будет хаосом и недопониманием. Что касается меня, то за все эти годы, будучи частым гостем международных форумов, вынужденность общаться на языке, который мне не родной, но более или менее свободно используется остальным миром, позволила мне усовершенствовать своё понимание и сотрудничать с людьми, разделяющими мои увлечения, будь то в Осло, на Крите, в Москве, Барселоне или где угодно. Короче говоря, это сблизило меня, живущего на небольшом острове посреди Средиземного моря, с остальным человечеством...

Edited December 3, 2025 by SARFlytitus

[Kubert]

English is not my primary language, but I prefer it here. For all people should be the same rules. All english or all their primary language. Second option would cause a mess here, so I vote for english. Why not to make a poll about it?

[Individ]

Dont understand, why simple things should be so much hard, such as forum sections like this:

1. English

    1.1 General discussions
    1.2 Screenshots and videos
    .....
 
2. Русский

    2.1 Общие темы
    2.1 Скриншоты и видео
    .....

3. Any other language
    ....

and give people right to make a decision, where they want to write topic. Its ok, if someone wants to write in english in russian section or vise-versa, but what the point to reduce convenience

Edited December 3, 2025 by Individ

[HootsButOlder]

1 hour ago, Individ said:

Dont understand, why simple things should be so much hard, such as forum sections like this:

1. English

    1.1 General discussions
    1.2 Screenshots and videos
    .....
 
2. Русский

    2.1 Общие темы
    2.1 Скриншоты и видео
    .....

3. Any other language
    ....

and give people right to make a decision, where they want to write topic. Its ok, if someone wants to write in english in russian section or vise-versa, but what the point to reduce convenience

The reason I started the thread is because when you take the unread posts option all languages are returned, as would happen in the above scenario. There’re filters for pretty much everything else so I figured one extra for languages would work well. 

[LukeFF]

5 hours ago, AEthelraedUnraed said:

As I said, there are very good reasons not to use machine translation, that you Admins still haven't addressed. You're effectively demanding the majority of people who understand English - many of them as a second or third language - to give up their privacy and increase their power consumption just so that those people who only know their own language don't need to translate it themselves. You're effectively punishing those people who did take the trouble of learning a second language at the expense of those who didn't.

I'm not against having a Russian (or whatever language) version of the same forum, but then this translation should be done on your side. Since you control the forum backend, you have the ability to automatically translate all posts in a secure and optimised way. Implement this as a service and an example to forums worldwide, rather than the annoying semi-functional mess it is now.

It's not being addressed because it's a red herring. No one on the admin team here is placing an unreasonable burden on you by suggesting you use an online translation site if you want to see what someone else wrote. We all do a billion things every day that have a far greater impact on the environment than finding out what a person from Moscow said about a new flight sim feature. Your option is then to either skip the posts you don't want to read or find a translation service you trust and use it. I, for one, am not entirely dependent on Google Translate; that much is true. 🙂

[Stromboli]

From now on, I'm only posting in Sign Language for my hearing-impaired Brothers and Sisters in the Flight Sim Community,👍🤚👌

Stromboli

[JG4_Deciman]

56 minutes ago, LukeFF said:

It's not being addressed because it's a red herring. No one on the admin team here is placing an unreasonable burden on you by suggesting you use an online translation site if you want to see what someone else wrote. We all do a billion things every day that have a far greater impact on the environment than finding out what a person from Moscow said about a new flight sim feature. Your option is then to either skip the posts you don't want to read or find a translation service you trust and use it. I, for one, am not entirely dependent on Google Translate; that much is true. 🙂

Well, I like herrings (most of them are sold either as 'Matjes' or as 'Rollmops')

But cutting it down to the real 'basics':
Formerly there were 2 different forums (russian and english one)
They were completly independant (had pro's and con's)

For the 'english' one existed a rule, to write in english language
and I think some users writing in their native (not english) language have been told about that rule afterwards...

Now we have ONE forum for both (because the 'russian' one does not exist as I assume)

So the choices you have are:
Set up a different forum (as before) where russian is the mandatory language
and let the other (nowadays only!) be 'english' language as mandatory
and close the gap between these 2 forums by whatever KI or personal power to make important things available no matter 'where' they had been posted.
In that case any person who wanted to read the 'other' furum could do that (as before) and would be aware of needing any kind of translationn tool.

Or let it be as it is.
In that case me (and I think many other 'non russian speaking users') will imply be annoyed by the content they cannot read and ignore it
BTW: Same for 'non english spreking users' posting content in russian!

So result:
Mostly every content posted in one of these 2 languages will be ignored by the members that cannot understand that language.
Simply: In case I post something i want it to be understandable, base language is english, so I post in english (NOT my native language)

I'm also (partial) able to understand french, but that's it.
For any other language I have to use translators.
And when testing them I figured out:
No matter which I had chosen... The result was NEVER what was written.
And I could confirm that by letting english and french postings beeing translated into german.
Sometimes I could 'guess' what was written there (even after understanding the native english or french posting)
sometimes I could only shake my head and lough about that, what the translation told me was written...

 

Deci
 

[AEthelraedUnraed]

7 hours ago, Avimimus said:

When put that way the proposal for single language forums is more reasonable. I'll grant that.

We don't want to discourage feedback about the forums - but we also want to make sure everyone feels welcome. We live in an era where it feels like countries are pulling back from each other, we want this forum to be a place which brings people together in a sense of International co-operation in the remembrance of history.

Please be careful about your word use with regard to other people. If we do see anything that seems to be encouraging inter-ethnic intolerance we'll need to come down on it hard. So avoid generalising about entire countries, languages, or ethnic groups.

Words like 'pollution' are inappropriate ways to describe people mixing languages, as it does imply a concept of linguistic or ethnolinguistic purity being imposed on others.

I never meant my words to come over as if I thought Russian is a rubbish language or the Russian culture is less worthy than any other; if they did then I apologise. I do enjoy the variety of cultures we have on this planet, and I hope that we can preserve as many as possible before they're forever lost in this rapidly changing world. I do feel however that having posts in other languages is bad news for the clarity, readability and dissemination of information on this forum.

As an "AI expert" (I hate the word), I'm all to aware of both the strengths and weaknesses of modern Neural Networks. I dare say more than all the Admins and most or all of the Developers. I feel very heavily that AI should never be forced upon anyone. Yet this is in effect what you are doing and this is what I'm railing against - not the Russian language or culture at all.

2 hours ago, LukeFF said:

It's not being addressed because it's a red herring. No one on the admin team here is placing an unreasonable burden on you by suggesting you use an online translation site if you want to see what someone else wrote. We all do a billion things every day that have a far greater impact on the environment than finding out what a person from Moscow said about a new flight sim feature. Your option is then to either skip the posts you don't want to read or find a translation service you trust and use it. I, for one, am not entirely dependent on Google Translate; that much is true. 🙂

Then we have different definitions of what is reasonable 🙂

IMO the use of online tools should never be mandatory. Besides the power cost that you may or may not feel heavily about, it is common knowledge that whatever you input in most of those tools, is used to retrain them to become better. And that's where our control stops. We don't know what happens with that information - it's most likely even the developers of the AI themselves don't know. There is a non-zero chance that if, a year from now, I ask some LLM "what is the password of LukeFF", I will get a valid answer. There is a non-zero risk that the next time you travel to certain countries, you might get arrested because of something you forwarded to a translation bot. Are those risks you want to take for something as unimportant as a forum post?

Personally, I'm not willing to take that risk. I'll leave any and all posts that are not in either English, Dutch or German unread and unanswered, and I actively encourage anyone else to do the same rather than upload your data to some AI that no-one really knows what it does or how it works. So where does that leave the better interaction between the various cultures that I suppose is the reason behind this whole merger, if it still leads to the same splits as before only more visible?

But I guess we'll see how it turns out. I just hope that:

1. You have some evaluation date where you'll have a look and see if it turned out the way you wanted and if not, go back to how it was before.
2. You still consider my proposal where the 1CGS servers take the burden of the translation and these forums become one of the pioneers of the new AI-powered internet, without sacrificing the privacy of your users and at relatively little power consumption.

[Dora]

9 hours ago, SARFlytitus said:

In my humble opinion, it's not a matter of polluting a few posts or entire threads. Regardless of the poster's culture/nationality/native language, the English language (like it or not) is what unites communities, allows them to communicate and exchange information. Furthermore, to stay on the strictly aeronautical theme, it ensures that global air traffic is not a jumble of chaos and misunderstandings. As for me, in all these years as a frequent visitor to international forums, being somehow forced to interact in a language that isn't my own but is used more or less fluently by the rest of the world has allowed me to perfect my understanding and allow me to collaborate with people who share my passions, whether in Oslo, Crete, Moscow, Barcelona, or wherever. In short, it has brought me closer to the rest of humanity, I who live on a small island in the middle of the Mediterranean...

But doesn't this perspective prevent you from learning new languages? Doesn't the ideal of an easy to understand playing field (through a machine which gives you whatever output it wants) swallow up national languages, cultures and nuances into a monolithic being? When I see the locations of friends you made through the English lingua franca, the only difference I see is the location (minus Moscow), but not a true cultural difference.

I hope the forums remain as is, just as Soviet military documents and manuals forced me to learn Russian, and have enriched me beyond the poor translations of Dostoevsky and Vladimir Sorokin that we get in "The West".

[Kubert]

@Dora I understand @SARFlytitus's post to mean that when communicating with other cultures, one can practice specifically in English language, not in all other languages.

22 minutes ago, Dora said:

When I see the locations of friends you made through the English lingua franca, the only difference I see is the location (minus Moscow), but not a true cultural difference.

You really mean it?  How you can say there is no difference between norwegian, spanish and greek cultures? C'mon...

[SARFlytitus]

@Dora Dear friend, your point is certainly interesting, but—there's always a but—in the specific case of this Forum, I keep in mind that the average age of community members is often in their late teens. With a few rare and fortunate exceptions, learning processes and general mental agility are no longer so fresh. In an "optimal" context, the stimulus to acquire new information, linguistic, cultural, and technical, is certainly a very positive thing. I have always believed, since I was a child, that mankind as a whole needed a common language that would perhaps help all of us human beings communicate more easily, without the need for mediators more or less interested in some "grand plan." Perhaps we could better blend the age-old cultural differences to arrive at a single idea of "Mankind." I have experienced all this in my own small way by frequenting the various international forums that bring me together with living beings with the same passions and interests as me: Medicine, History, modelling, RC models, virtual reality, flight simulations, sailing, psychology, literature, ending with the world opinions on which car to buy, which food is the healthiest and so on... to make a long story short, I had a language very different from my own to participate constructively or even passively in all of this, and it took me 60 years to try to break down the language barrier with English, simply because it is the most widely used and understood language globally. Certainly not with the classical Greek or Latin I studied as a young man and, yes,I am Italian and I speak my language well, I also speak Sardinian which is the language of my island and I speak its three dialects quite well, very different from each other because one derives from Latin, one from Catalan and one from Arabic I understand French perfectly, I get by with a little Spanish and I would have loved to be able to study German, Russian, or Mandarin Chinese, but time is always too short and my brain cells, at least what's left of them, now seem barely enough to float on what I've acquired.
Take it for what it is, the opinion of a former young man now out of competition, in love with this planet and everything on it.

Edited December 3, 2025 by SARFlytitus

[Avimimus]

3 hours ago, AEthelraedUnraed said:

IMO the use of online tools should never be mandatory.

[...]

Personally, I'm not willing to take that risk. I'll leave any and all posts that are not in either English, Dutch or German unread and unanswered, and I actively encourage anyone else to do the same rather than upload your data to some AI that no-one really knows what it does or how it works.

I found this post very reasonable. I will point out though, that all software has some risks:

I think I already posted a link to "Reflections on trusting trust" (Thompson, 1984) in response to something else in another thread - so I won't post it here. But any website, any operating system, could become compromised - including ones without any connection to LLM providers.

Arguably, what people are posting in these forums can be scraped by bots (as these are public forums) anyway, and copying the text of someone else's post into a translator doesn't increase the risk to one's own data (other than the translator possibly connecting whatever the post is with your IP address).

 

3 hours ago, AEthelraedUnraed said:

I feel very heavily that AI should never be forced upon anyone.

My good sir, I agree with you.

Up the Butlerian Jihad!

[Calos_01]

On 12/3/2025 at 1:40 AM, AEthelraedUnraed said:

Doarneffe zou't krek nèt zijn as 'k kon spreken wa'k wou, moar da goat nooit nie gebeuren.

I was delighted that I was becoming a polyglot, but I'm afraid that "goat" in Dutch may not actually mean goat....🤔