Under my entry yesterday on General Right of Personality, Derek Thornton asks me if this is the kind of post I would normally have made in FLEFO.
FLEFO is the Foreign Languages Educational Forum, some sections of which are used by translators (section 10 for queries, section 11 for general, section 12 for technology). FLEFO used to be much more populated, in the days when the WWW had not really taken off and before CSi was bought by AOL. It should be accessible even for non-members now, but I am still a member and when I enter via the Web I am recognized. Derek says this link should work.Of course, in the old days – I joined in 1994 – I used special software that downloaded all the new messages in one fell swoop, thus saving online time. My first offline reader was NavCis, I think. Later I used the very geeky Virtual Access. Some still use the DOS program TapCis. These programs gave a good view of the thread structure, too. There used to be no spam on CompuServe, and it was the first place I encountered translators from all over the world. Perhaps because it wasn’t cheap to be a member at first, there seemed less noise than in newsgroups or mailing lists.
Now, there are very few active members of FLEFO, and I would not expect an answer to a DE>EN translation question. There is sometimes more going on in the Issues section, discussing politics, than in the translation sections. However, it is still alive (it once looked as if AOL would dump it):