And I thought it was because of the email breach.
PN was told to polish up it's act, and that's the outcome

David, that's awful!

No, I agree, an innovative and productive step that could mean some good gains for plusnet. Nice to see them thinking out of the box again after years of playing catchup with the market.

And to quote Wikipedia, "monoglot Welsh speakers are now virtually non-existent". I would guess with the huge amount of technical terms for an ISP that translating it into Welsh would be a very half-hearted effort at best.

But I like it!

Well, if it's on wikipedia it must be true!

Welsh is still a very common language, sure, not as much as many languages, but there are a lot of Welsh people who hold onto their language, use it daily and many who were brought up with it as their primary form of communication. I'm sure there are also plenty of Welsh-language supporters who'd also gladly step forwards and give up their time to localise parts of the PlusNet site.

Not to say that this would actually give any huge gains for PlusNet, but you could say the same of having a Polish website for a British ISP whose main language of communication and suport is English. But it's fun and probably makes the staff who did it happy and a few Polish speakers may be attracted by the gesture.

I do see some negatives, but it really does not worry me if they do it in Outermongolian.

The negatives seem to me to be that some longer term resident people, say like the Chinese, asian or indeed the Welsh may feel left out and it could foster some bad relations between long term residents and new immigrants.
Secondly comments recently about local authorities translating everything into many foreign languages discouraged integration and encouraged entrenched feelings
Thirdly wonder how much time will be spent with serious problems having to be translated back into English so that they can be resolved by people further up the tree?

I'm guessing though that this is a good "get them in" sales strategy as the rest of the portal and other tools/announcements won't be available in polish?

Maybe the answers are in there, in Polish?

This was already well underway when I last visited PN Towers, tbh I thought it was quite a good idea.

Bear in mind that they have been asking for developers for a long time, and have already employed several polish staff. Its pretty well known that poland seems to be a good resource for certain IT specialists. I believe that because they already have a fair few polish staff they realised there was a gap that could be put to good potential.

TBH I too wondered why start with the polish community, but it makes sense when they already have so many people there whose first language it is anyhow.
I actually asked "why not say one of the Indian languages". The reply was along the lines of they dont actually have that many staff who speak that particular language.
I suppose you do have to start somewhere, so why not utilise what resources they already have. If it bombs, no big deal. Most companies try something new at some point or other.

>> Thirdly wonder how much time will be spent with serious problems having to be translated back into English so that they can be resolved by people further up the tree?

I guess thats the whole reason they chose polish in the first place!
Theres already sufficient staff in various positions not for this to be a problem.

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As regards to the comments regarding questions unanswered re the mail that has been brought up several times, then this doesnt really wash IMHO.. because in all companies there are certain people whose responsibility is for certain areas.
Some peoples job wouldnt come near other areas. Therefore the fact that person B is responsible for doing XYand Z, doesnt mean that person A knows the first thing about X,Y or Z as is beyond what they were employed to do in the first place.
This project has been underway for a while, and has I believe simply been a case of translation. Theres even a member of CS whose first language is polish who I believe will take the majority of responsibility for any queries that come in. No disrespect to that person, but they probably wouldn't have, nor never will have anything to do with the email system as that ownership will belong elsewhere.

I know its not the same, but say if it was a hospital and an urgent case came in needing heart surgery, then youd get all the heart specialists running, but you wouldnt expect the cleaners to drop their mops and pick up a scapel to join in would you. Therefore CS/certain web developers etc etc just wont ever get involved in something which belongs to Networks.

Just be easier to screw them over with constantly changing packages and webpages with ever-so-confusing information (I don't think it's clear enough in English, yet alone any other langauge) which most of your regular forum-ers won't be able to double check for accuracy on PlusNet's behalf as they've been able to with the standard version during the past few years.

I wonder, does Ofcom have a Polish specific team which can deal with broadband complaints?