There’s an issue I’ve been struggling with for months now. Well, more than a year really. We built Marela so it would be used in Slovenia by people preferring Slovene language over the others. It’s not the only distinguishing point from similar services found on the web, but it’s an important one.

However, Internet and low fares airlines certainly shrank our planet and it’s not uncommon for many of us to have friends who don’t speak our language but with whom we’d still like to share parts of our lives and our creations. And this is a problem for Marela, which was (also) built to fill this need of sharing.

It’s simply not possible to use Marela in any language but Slovene.

We decided to do this to avoid Orkut syndrome, where brazilian users (legitimately) subverted a global service into a mostly Portuguese speaking one. We didn’t want to risk making our site unfriendly to Slovene-only speaking members by creating an environment in which a large portion of our community neither could or would speak Slovene.

I believe our interfaces are mostly self-explanatory and easy to use, but it’s difficult to tell how challenging they are for those who don’t speak their language. Judging by personal experience in using a dutch Windows 95 years ago, I’d say they are probably not easy enough.

So, what can be done?

There was an idea to enforce Slovene only for logged in users, but this can work only as long as unregistered users are not allowed to contribute and the idea itself doesn’t feel natural to me. It seems such an artificial restriction and that never amounts to a good thing. And that was one of more promising ones.

I ran out of my own ideas long time ago. Any ideas you might have are therefore more than welcome.