Language Policies in Online Communities

There’s been an interesting discussion in the blogosphere regarding the decision of one of our virtual world clients to only permit English in open chat.  Doesn’t that unfairly discriminate against non-English speakers? Aren’t virtual worlds for everyone, not just those who speak the Queen’s (or common) English?

Of course, this begs the question of why anyone would want to speak in a way that is largely not understandable by the rest of the group.  Community is in fact derived from communication.  Regardless, all of these questions are irrelevant to our role as professional moderators.  We are not policy-makers; we merely enforce the rules.  If we only selectively enforced the rules, our client would dismiss us and pay someone else to enforce them.  If we strongly disagree with any rules, we can work to persuade our client to change the rules or we can terminate our relationship.  Here, our client’s legitimate policy to remain English-only is based on a complex decision involving legal, licensing, and branding issues.  Of course, if such barriers can be overcome, it is optimal to allow all languages in a community.  From a company standpoint, we would love to more frequently use our foreign-speaking moderators and localization services.

Fortunately, non-English speaking users in this particular online community can acquire on the virtual goods market a very inexpensive (sometimes free) device that in real time translates their foreign language into English.  That way all the community members can participate in all the discussions.

–Amy