How should we cope with internationalisation issues?

Question

I asked a question , because I'd search for "kohl rabi" which is what the ingredient is called over here, and not found anything.

I suspect there are hundreds of differences in ingredient names (what is shortening?), or even cooking methods (what is a broiler?) Which I fear may limit the effectiveness of the site without tweaking the search to allow for the synonyms out there -- either that or there needs to be a lot of editing to keep this site being relevant to a worldwide audience.

What do you think can be done to keep this applicable to a worldwide audience?

Answer 1

I have to say, as a Brit I'm feeling like I'm less likely to remain a regular user of this site over time. I don't think so much it's the language/terminology issues - we seem to be managing perfectly well with everyone posting in their own local derivative of English, which seems in the majority to be American English (My only personal bug-bear is grilling & broiling in American English not being what I expect, and I have to make a conscious effort when reading these terms).

Obviously from a personal standpoint it would be easiest if everything was written in English, but I'm happy to research ingredient names or translate units as and when appropriate. In fact I reguarly do this already to some extent, considering I often use recipes from my girlfriend's native French (often written in Ch'ti to further complicate matters!).

What I do find difficult, however, is understanding posts that assume a US audience, or make reference to American culture as assumed knowledge. Things like assuming an ingredient will or won't be available, or that it will come in a given form (eg. In many countries UHT milk is the norm, whereas as I Brit I'm more used to HT/SL, flash-pasteurised, milk).

To summarise somewhat, I don't particuarly think we need to worry too much about ingredient names or units of measure - at the end of the day a salmon is a salmon, regardless of what you call it. What I do think we really need to be careful of are assumptions we make about where other users come from. Obviously some questions will have to be region-specific, but then I feel they should be tagged as such.

Other sites that I'm an active member of manage to make it easy for everyone, such as photo.stackexchange.com and of course stackoverflow.com, so I don't see why we can't.

Answer 2

The general population seems to be north American, as best I can tell from the vocabulary commonly used (I understand most of it). This may initially be confusing to new members from other countries, but one of two things will happen:

1) Foreign visitors will come and be too confused by the terminology to effectively use the site, and use vernacular that the board as a whole doesn't understand, resulting in their questions dieing with low views and no answers. They will be forced to join the common language or not use the system.

2) Mutual education will happen, where the American users will google the terms posted when confusing and figure things out. Mods, familiar with numerous regional dialects, will re-tag with whatever they deem appropriate. The community chugs along and everyone learns something new.

I like 2. Something between these will probably happen. It'll be interesting to see what the hive mind comes up with.

Maybe the meta would be a place to create a taxonomy of international differences in food vocabulary. Or is that appropriate for the main board?

Answer 3

In the first days of the beta I was quite excited. But now I realize that this site is not so useful to me. I would like to ask about food and recipes of my country, whit replies from people living in my country, because the insights of a national cuisine are well known mostly by people living there. Probably this will evolve to a mostly US-focused site, and this is really uncommon for a Stack Exchange site.

Answer 4

Not much can be done I don't think. We could tag things with the different names, but I think we'll be using up a lot of tags for that. It's also unreasonable to expect a questioner to learn what everyone else in the world calls something.

For example, I had a question about pork rinds. I never knew that there were 3 different names for them. Apparently scratchings in the UK and crackle in Australia & NZ. Another big one is grilling. Well, what Americans calls grilling. Apparently everywhere else in the world a grill is called a barbecue, but barbecue to many Americans is a very specific way to cook meat.

Given the tools we currently have, I think the best way is for zealous editors to help out by adding other terms in footnotes.