Are you not going the opposite way to what the government is trying to achieve and that is to get immigrants to learn English? Sorry but it seems a damn silly idea to me.

Hi guys,

I appreciate your opinions, and we take them all on board.

This is essentially an experiment, if it works we'll look to do it in other languages too.

We chose Polish as we have quite a few members of staff whose first language is Polish, who suggested the idea in the first place, and have committed a fair bit of their spare time to launch this project.

We don't have any Welsh-speaking staff, otherwise I'm sure we'd have a Welsh portal too. If anyone who speaks Welsh would like to come and work for us we may give them a bit of work to do in that area!

IMO offering things like Tech Support in Polish will encourage people to join communities, by giving them access to things like study websites, and join groups which interest them, which in turn will encourage them to learn English.

If someone wants to move here but not learn the language etc, let's not pretend that our portal will change that person's mind, nor will it persuade people who do want to learn these things not to bother.

As I've said I think it's a fun and generally positive move. Shame that good old Neil Armstrong had to play the PR spin game with it though I'm sure he causes the company as much bad press as the good press he tries to generate. But then again, I guess there's no such thing as bad publicity!

Well, I hope they're doing it in their free time, and that someone's ticket isn't waiting in the queue because staff are busy designing a Polish website! I wouldn't rank translation services as a very high priority at all, for a UK ISP, selling to a UK market.

Of course there will always be customers or potential customers whose first or preferred language isn't English, but unless you are going to spend more time and money translating things than on the actual core business of the company, I don't see how you can ever fully address this. Every time you provide a translation for one community, there's bound to be another one crop up, saying: "Where's ours?". I don't know where it stops. This is how my local council ends up publishing everything in 40+ languages, even though it's not a particularly cosmopolitan area, and I'd be surprised if we had more than a couple of dozen speakers of some of them!

T.

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This is essentially an experiment, if it works we'll look to do it in other languages too

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I assume that as the portal is live, and no doubt will accept orders in Polish, that the T&C's is also in Polish?. After all the T&C's is the legal binding Contract.

Hi

Signups are currently done over the phone, and the T+C's are communicated to the customer.

We'll be looking at automating this depending on the reaction, however as the project has been done out of people's spare time at the moment we decided not to translate the whole signup journey initially.

I reckon there's got to a be a geek up at PlusNet HQ who speaks klingon, if it's good enough for Google it's gotta be good enough for PlusNet If you need some tips, pop over to the Klingon Language Institue.

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I assume that as the portal is live, and no doubt will accept orders in Polish, that the T&C's is also in Polish?. After all the T&C's is the legal binding Contract.

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Yup... they're here : http://www.plus.net/pl/tani_internet_zasady_uzytkowania.html

Nice one Liam . Don't upset any Polish customers they may want to quote them back at you