Dear ESA forum user

This is a very serious post where we as ESA forum administrators would like to hear from the forum users as to how we should address individuals who violate our language policy.

We are all ears to any and all sensible suggestions.

I would like to qualify that we get no joy from banning any party for any reason, all banning does is dilutes our user base which is bad for ESA as a website and our users.


Kind regards
Antionette
ESA support.

I have no problem with it being English, but as a number of contributors have indicate, there are a just few Afrikaans words / phrases that have no equivalent in English.

My suggestion is to allow a word / phrase but it should be in quotation marks and be relevant to the topic of under discussion.

I have no issues either way, I don't even know why it was put in place in the first place.

But if one gets banned for using a non-english word then that sounds a bit crazy and means that Eddie will have to be out here all day everyday whipping asses (even though he secretly enjoys whips and asses)

With most of us, English not being our first language or even second for that matter, I suppose at times the real context is lost or gets weaker in an effort to try and stick to English at all costs. As jjsoap said, one word (maybe in quotes as he said or not) does no harm; instead the message context may be much clearer (maybe to most locals) especially if the word used is within the official language context. Not sure about international site visitors though; are they even a meaningful number?

With that said I believe if a word or phrase in Afrikaans is allowed, so should words or phrases in other official languages of SA to avoid perpetual outcries.

Well, I know this is not what you want to hear, but I believe the rule should be abolished altogether. And I'm a first language English speaker.

I regrettably agree with ESA on this one
With soo much negative social media posts about race and politics.
It might just be best to use only one language.
You just need one A hole to post something doof and the shit hits the fan.
I am guessing if they allow Afrikaans they would have to allow other languages as well.

They will properly find it very difficult to manage IE delete and ban members making those posts up easily if they not in English and so on.


A good lesson to those of us with Facebook and so on be careful what you say nothing is private anymore.

If an user violate the policy .. he or she should atleased be warned before banning.

Especially the ladies .. in this tough time they need every cent to survive and if their profile is deactivate no marketing is possible and making it extremely tough for them !!!

I stand to be corrected, but I assume that the vast majority of Esa forum users are South African. South Africa has 11 official languages.

English is not the first language of every single South African forum member, yet most forum users have always in the past tried their best to interact on the forum in English (without the language policy being stipulated/enforced as English only), this despite facing the possibility of becoming the recipients of ridicule and attack by the spelling Nazis, as a result of it. This effort by forum members in the past, whose 1st language is not English, should be commended and also points to the fact that a forced language policy is not really needed.

I feel that things were fine as it were before the English Language policy was imposed, because very few people interacted exclusively in Afrikaans or any of the other non-English South African Languages, so most users understood what was written in anycase. Besides, a multitude of translation applications can be found online, which can help one translate languages into English. I certainly do not have an issue with people conversing in their 1st language.

Language is part of our identity and imo our diversity should be celebrated, not suppressed. Therefore I feel that people should not be banned for using any of our remaining 10 official languages and that the English language policy should be abolished.

If Esa feels that there is absolutely no room for completely abolishing the English language policy, then may I suggest than banning is only implemented when a thread title and thread content is exclusively written in one of the 10 remaining official languages, as opposed to banning people who express themselves in one of those languages with only a few words or a sentence.

On 2018-07-03 17:43:38 tommy1975 said:
I regrettably agree with ESA on this one
With soo much negative social media posts about race and politics.
It might just be best to use only one language.
You just need one A hole to post something doof and the shit hits the fan.
I am guessing if they allow Afrikaans they would have to allow other languages as well.
They will properly find it very difficult to manage IE delete and ban members making those posts up easily if they not in English and so on.

A good lesson to those of us with Facebook and so on be careful what you say nothing is private anymore.

Bud....one can be a racist, punt your political views, be abusive and derogatory perfectly well in english.

We have seen many examples on this forum, yet those posts make it past the language policy.

But dare to use a non-english that does not impact on the context of the discussion and you are banned.

This clearly misses the point!

I would suggest the occasional word as in bbq, which every Saffer knows what that is. If you have a habitual offender, more than twice, after receiving a warning, then ban them