Help with website questions

Jane McGary janemcgary@earthlink.net
Fri, 20 Sep 2013 13:51:30 PDT
Hello all,
People who visit the PBS website can send questions to it, and many 
of these come to me as Membership Coordinator. Some of the questions 
are about plants unfamiliar to me, so I refer them to this forum, as 
I did with the recent question from a gardener in Qatar about growing 
Caladium. She asks me to convey her thanks to Boyce Tankersley and 
Leo Martin, who were very helpful.

Sometimes the questions are in languages other than English. I can 
read a number of these, but I feel comfortable writing in only a few, 
so I'm asking for help in formulating my replies. The questions often 
involve information about using the website, and I don't know, and 
can't find, the Spanish, French, and German equivalents for terms 
such as these: click on, button, highlighted, post, (web) page. I 
know a few others from seeing them when using computers in other 
countries, such as "search." (And how do you ask the Internet center 
clerk, "Where is the @?!" It was once Control Q but it seems to have 
been moved. Not to mention finding an apostrophe in keyboards 
designed for languages that don't use it.) Webmaster David Pilling 
sometimes uses Google's translate function, but today it was baffled 
by a message that I think was sent from a phone, without punctuation. 
Fortunately the organic brain does not need punctuation as much as the AI does.

Can some of our multilingual members please write to me (privately, 
as this is not very bulb-related) and tell me how to say the 
abovementioned words in various European languages? Our inquiry 
function apparently doesn't support questions posed in non-European 
writing systems, so at least I'm not begging for an assistant who 
reads Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, or Hindi.

The flow of information about our beloved plants that travels the 
world is a constant source of wonder to me. The help gardeners extend 
to one another and the living world truly reflects the "peace" in 
Pacific Bulb Society.

Jane McGary
Membership Coordinator, PBS





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