Hmm, have pity on those who don't speak English well, why not have foreign language forums.

I say go for it, thopiekar do you have a maemo.org login so you can add this as a task?

do they want my pity? hehe

one more point - people that speak European languages seem to have quite a good grasp of English - it seems to be the stray Vietnamese or Cambodians coming through here that have trouble with English

Don't get me wrong - i'd like itT to have a global following with forums in every language - the problem is, the community isn't large enough to achieve an equal spread of knowledge across all languages

No certainly not large enough to support all languages, but we might as well try to support some of those where the Nokia devices can be bought.

I'd guess the majority of HowTos, etc., will continue to be written in English (even if the writer is foreign, more exposure writing in English), with the non-English forums being used for those not confident enough at English/wanting confirmation that their understanding is correct.

Well, at least in Germany, English is not always taught as second language in school and I know many people who can't read or speak English very well because they learnt it too late and don't have it around every day.

I'd suggest that people should be advised to use the English forum here unless English is a problem.
That way the people who don't speak English well have a place where they can ask questions, but the subforums wouldn't get too crowded which makes them easier to maintain and helps avoiding fragmentation.

At the moment, probably yes. As I pointed out earlier, there already was an attempt to establish at least a German thread here, and it more or less failed.

I also share your concerns about what you call a "knowledge management meltdown", given the relatively small size of the community ATM. (As an example, from what I read in his profile, fanoush is from the Czech Republic. I very much doubt it would have been a good thing had he found a Czech subforum here from the very start and only participated there...)

On the other hand the current situation (and again, I'm not referring to ITT only, but to the whole information infrastructure we have, from the Wiki to the maemo.org static pages to the package descriptions in extras to this forum...) scares away people who don't feel comfortable enough with English or don't understand it at all. I'm convinced this makes for a bad user experience. (Just imagine you never have access to all the information offered here and in the Wiki etc.!)

Personally, I think information exchange at a higher level (=less participants worldwide, people who are used to English because it's used in other areas as well) should remain in English only because it helps to bring people together. This would certainly include everything that's currently accessible via maemo.org.

Language-specific subforums here may be an experiment if they can be done without much effort, but I still doubt they'd easily reach the audience they should be intended for: after all, you'd need to navigate through an English site before you reach the sub-forum, an even if we overcome this, it might simply be not attractive enough in terms of content at first. (chicken/egg)

The ideal solution should be a low-level site (a little like tablet school) that's attractive to those who never had access to the information we take for granted meanwhile because we follow the existing resources for years.
Static content, maybe a wiki, most of it probably directly taken and translated from existing English sources. This site would then have a forum of its own (or link to a language-subforum here, whatever), so that people have something to talk about (like "I tried cloning to SD yesterday, but I don't see my video files any more now").

There should also be a way to add language-specific descriptions to packages that show up in the application manager. If this can't be done (and is not "fixed in Fremantle"), the language specific site could as well provide a list of applications automatically taken from extras and translate the package desciptions so people can read them online. Better than nothing.

The goal of all this would be to give people access to everything the NIT can do that's not described in the Nokia manual, enhancing the user experience, helping to make the devices and the platform popular.
The downside: Right now, because we lack such resources, people who would need them might probably already have sold their tablets again. We'd invest a lot of work to create these sites, maintain them, and I bet it'll be more than a year until there's enough users who visit them.

Also, I don't know what Nokia is up to with maemo.nokia.com... Will there be a maemo.nokia.{de|fr|es|..}? Will it be the "come here and discover what else your device can do"-thing for all supported languages? Or will it be English only again?

That is, and has practically always been, possible. Most people just don't do it.

Feel free to jump in and start submitting translation patches to maintainers, though.

Also, this will probably interest you: https://wiki.maemo.org/Objective:Community_localization

There is a potential problem with localisation though: legal responsibility. The site owner is not able to comprehend all these languages. To work around this the group of people who speak a certain language have to be, at a whole, mature and bear the responsibility to translate something to English at the request of the site owner.

I feel reasonably mature

I'd have assumed that the owner of a site like "treffpunkt-maemo.de" or whatever would be a native German speaker. And that there'd be a different, independent site in Spanish etc., and that none of these would formally depend on the current admins/sites.

(After all: It's us German speaking users who want to have it, why should somebody else do the work for us ?)

I think a german subform on talk.maemo.org would be great. Localization works for a lot of sites...why not here? I don't believe that it will be a problem to find mods.
Using another site than the official maemo page is suboptimal. Having everything useful on a single domain is a huge pro imho.

Altough my technical knowledge about the N800 is...lets say improvable, I have some basic knowledge and could help fighting spam and other garbage in the forum. Actually my english is a bit rusty and not as fluently as it was years ago but I could also do some translation.