I think that the chatbox and the rest of Perlmonks are altogether different issues.

The chatbox is used for short lived informal conversations and quickly solving a problem. There is little standard to follow there including of languages. Admittedly if there are too many conversations in too many languages we will need some threading and selection devices. But we are not yet there.

The rest of perlmonks is material that is here to stay. I would not like to see a balkanization here. Now, I am able to get most of the material that is posted. I may make a fool of myself with my broken English but I am still able to get my ideas thru. This way, I am able to be part of a large and thriving communauty.

If one wants to contribute in his own language, perl mongers sites will be a better place. If they reach a certain size, perhaps they will support perlmonks like features. Knowing English is probably a stiff barrier but this is almost the most important command ground of the Open source movement. We can translate the documentation in many languages, write in C, Perl or Python. But the identifiers are in English. So one has to learn English. That's what I did when I started to dabble with UNIX (not open source at this time) because my school level was so low. In a sense that was an opportunity because I would not otherwise have the courage to learn English.

-- stefp