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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

It's a .de site, for a German conference.

As someone who went to CCC more than once, it's a very international conference. Everything official related to the conference is in English (or bilingual). Some talks are in German, but a large majority is in English (at least this is how I remember it). Anyway the point is that the organisers care about non- german speakers, so it's not an unreasonable request.

Though being able to filter out talks by language might still be useful, because there are enough non-German talks to make that worthwhile. (Also for people who only speak, say, German and Polish, and might not want to bother with the English talks.)

They have translation both from deutsch to English and English to Deutsch, therefore filtering would make no difference.

I don't see how this is related

US conferneces don't bother with that aspect. Why should we put the onus on everyone else?

It’s about the field (computers, software). Not about the country. As a non english nor german native speaker, I appreciate English text/audio as much as possible in any situation.

I am not sure which "we" you are referring to, but CCC puts quite some effort in dubbing and subtitles (while those can take more time to publish)

Racism has no place in CCC. You are not part of "we".

You are aware that a German hacker conference taking place in Germany wouldn't have to make anything at all in English if they didn't like to?

The fact they do that is nice, but I am not aware US hacker conferences offer translations into other languages.

Nobody mentioned translations, why are you talking about them?

This nationalistic spirit wouldn't fit in CCC anyway so I don't get why you feel so strongly about this.

I don't feel strong about this at all, I am teaching bilingual (German/English) at a German university myself.

Also, quote from the first comment in this discussion tree: not all contain translations then another person It's a .de site, for a German conference and then the post I responded to: I don't see how this is related.

My response was aimed at the anglosphere arrogance of assuming naturally that everyone has to do everything in their language.

Yeah, not all contain translations, and the lack of translations makes the feature that was suggested (the ability to filter by language) useful. I think you misunderstood what OP was saying.

Nobody assumed that "everyone has to do everything in their language", and please remember that english specifically is not used because of this but rather because it plays the role of a "lingua franka". The real arrogance is when there is an active attempt to exclude people by third parties in an event that explicitly attempting to be international, inclusive, antiracist, antinationalist, antiborder, etc.

Who is trying to exclude anybody? If German was the lingua franca, would you demand that a conference in the US or China offer translations on their recordings, and call them racist if they didn't?

> Who is trying to exclude anybody?

I invite you to look at this thread.

> would you demand that a conference in the US or China offer translations on their recordings, and call them racist if they didn't?

I am sure that an imaginary version of me would respond to this completely unrelated hypothetical question. But personally I really don't see how it fits into anything.

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