After an experience a week or so ago, I became very curious on a subject that's probably more prevalent in European realms then US, but I thought I'd throw this out here, and if it's too far afield, or too surveyish, my apologies:

Are there raid guilds (yes, Karazhan counts, but let's cut it down to at least attempting Curator - that is, a few demonstrated raid successes in the multiple language environment) that experience success with multiple active languages in raid? (Not "in guild", and mostly referring to real time communication - Vent and the like)

It may not be much of a topic, but I was terribly curious, and I thought this the best place. My experience was incredibly limited: one social member came along, and hadn't been to any of the fights, doesn't speak English very well, and was having a little trouble with the boss (I wanna say Lurker, but it may've been something else). So then on, after giving raid briefing (or refreshers), he got a repeat in my terrible Spanish. Seems a bit cumbersome.

I'm curious, and forgive me if this is an absurd question, but are there guilds that are, for example, French and German? If they're all well spoken in English, do they do that? Are all guilds effectively (at the raid level) monolingual? Do the odd persons out get a partner who translates for them?

Moving a little far afield topic-wise, is there an "Italian" EJ? Worldofraids?

In the US realms, I would go out on a limb and say that deaf members in a vent-using guild are more common, and the situation is very comparable. I have no experience in either case, but I've seen the deafness subject brought up a couple of times on the official wow forums, and never the language issue.

I play in a guild with members from all over Europe, and although all members speak English fluently, the Greeks have a habit of yelling in Greek when they get excited. Like alot of EU guilds we have our fair share of Swedes aswell. Forgot to mention that on Boulderfist EU, where my alt is, there is a large guild (400+ members) consisting of just Chinese players, who all speak very poor or no English at all.

My guild has quite a few members from the Phillipines. Sometimes I get the impression that they speak better english than anyone else.

I used to play on Skullcrusher, and moved to Stonemaul with my guild when we got free transfers. Now, Stonemaul turned into the new unofficial Russian server.

We decided to do payed transfers after almost a year of horrible PuGs. There is nothing more irritating then not understanding what someone is saying and not being able to directly communicate with them.

When people say more than a few lines in their native tongue to each other in guildchat, most of us are very offended aswell. Cant imagine something like that happening in raids.

As for your second question: I doubt it.

Their are one or two Singapore based guilds on Proudmoore. I ran some MC,Onyxia pugs with them pre TBC, TS and some raid chatter in Singaporean, raid instructions in English.

Currently there is a guild called Praetorians on Kael'Thas. My horde guild on that server was in a raiding conglomerate with them and it most of the raid's first time attempting anything further than maiden. What I didn't understand at the start of the run was that their MT (a paladin) actually only spoke spanish and that the majority of their guild was south american.

We discovered this on Opera when he was tanking on the wrong side of the room for BBW. I found this out and then proceeded to communicate with him via spanish (rather broken on my end but I could get the point across). We ended up getting aran to around 25% with a group who had never seen the opera event before.

I would say it is entirely possible as long as there are people who can bridge the language gap who are leading the raid. I would think the greater problem would be finding boss strategies in the language most comfortable to the players, which may require the intermediaries in the guild to translate it for them.

For those who are curious, there are several sorts of french speaking players.

Most of us are playing on EU-French realms. But you can find people from Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec, or french overseas territories. Same language, but different cultures, and some words that are completely different (for players from Quebec most of the time). It is not really multilinguism, even if some words or expressions are really different, and you will never see some kind of segregation, even if people are always pleased to meet guys from their country in their guild.

But it doesn't really matter (only when you try to meet IRL in fact ). Some of them try to play on the same servers due to the time difference between France and overseas territories or Quebec (it's pretty hard to raid with your guild when it's 4pm and you're at work, and there aren't many people connected when it's 5 am in France).

There are also some french players who are on UK servers because they played another MMORPG before WoW, that didn't have specific french realms. Most of the time the french community tried to use the same server, but some players with a decent English level could without any problem be in English guilds. Some of them followed their guild in WoW and are on UK servers.

Some French people simply don't want to play with other French people (yes we know how boring we can be )

For these people, it's simply a choice, and they're happy with it.

The problem comes from Quebec players: those who didn't buy european versions of the game thought they could switch to French servers, but blizzard didn't allow it. Being French I'm not in this case, but naturally we have some feedback of Quebec players on EU realms. And it seems they're not so much welcome on US servers (especially by Canadian players).

This can lead to posts like this one on official french forums:
Forums de wow-europe.com -> Les francophones d’Amérique crient à l’aide

This is a SOS of french speaking players on US realms, who complains they are often insulted. It seems it was a bit hard when war in Iraq began and France didn't want to be implicated in it (I'm still amazed that some people aren't able to see the difference between France and Quebec). I don't know if the situation has evolved now.

Finally, for the OP, yes we have some French equivalents of World of Raids or WoWhead:

Réseau JudgeHype is the most read (JudgeHype World of Warcraft)
It is a great quests/items/NPC's database, with some news about WoW, and poor quality forum compared to this one (when we are searching for some good theorycraft, we take a look here).

WoWdbu is coming back after one year offline, with raid spoilers, a database, and some other features (WoWDBU 2, la plus grosse base d'informations sur World of Warcraft : quêtes, objets, monstres, sets, sorts, guides raid, ... !)

And you can find some class-specific websites:

L'Assemblée des Défias - Guide du Voleur - Le site fait par et pour les Voleurs - World of Warcraft for rogues is a good exemple.

I'm a french-speaker from Quebec, and although I've been for more than a year in a French guild on a US server, I used to raid with US guilds, as did the vast majority of the people now in my guild. I was raiding along with 6-7 french speakers (all bilingual) in an English guilds; everything happened in English but we joked with each other and gave tips in French over private Ventrilo/TeamSpeak keybindings. All of us that transferred are now much more happy in a French guild, as it makes every aspect of communication and socializing much more comfortable. It was enough, at least, to convince us to reroll new characters, as our old ones (in a Naxx guild last July) were Horde and the new guild Alliance. Speaking our own language is also a point of pride for many of us.

As far as French-haters go... yeah, there are some, there are nice people too. We just get used to it, and (unfortunately) the guild learned to keep a low profile regarding our French identity. I'd certainly wish there was a French North-American server, though, where people wouldn't respond "French sucks, go USA" to the occasionnal French words in General or Trade channels.

Anyway, our former (pre-BC) MT used to be the Main Tank in a predominantly English guild. The thing is, he speaks very little English, so his 3-4 french-speaking friends had to translate everything for him. Appaently, despite this pretty big hurdle, things went smoothly. That guild wasn't cutting edge, of course, but it worked.

PS: I thought this would be a nice occasion to spread the word on the WoW Québec, Forum Québécois de World of Warcraft : Index , a forum to help Quebeckers playing WoW to speak with each other, recruit, etc. Most participants are in US-based French raiding guilds, but it's open to all.

My experience in european guilds is that the guild will prefer one language for raid chat and all apps will have to be competent enough in that language to understand instructions and make themselves understood. It's usually english (obv on french/german/spanish servers it'll default to those) but there are other single language guilds/raid groups out there.

Of course people chat in other languages too, but not during raids.

We have 10 nations represented in our guild, from Iceland to Turkey. All communication is in english, but not everyone is quite as fluent in english as they would like so sometimes people help each other out by explaining in their native tongue if things get too complicated.

There are of course single language guilds on the european servers, but multilingual guilds are very common. Most people have english as their second language and many learn better english from being in a guild where english is being used all the time.

The major languages in europe have been segregated though, english, french, german and spanish all have their own servers.

My guild consists of 40% Dutch speaking people, 30% Scandinavians, some British people and rest all over europe. Our raid language is mainly English but we tend to speak some dutch in between.
My worst experience was some pug with Italian people, they translated everything through babelfish and it was just horrible.

In my guild we have people from all over europe, that I remember quick we have persons from Portugal, Spain, England, Belgic, Norway, Sweden, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece, Russia and probably some more that I'm forgetting, it will be around 10 or more different language, but in raid chat only English is spoken there is no other way of a raid to work, in guild chat english is the rule, and while is not "enforced" eveyrone respects that

On the different languages in raid, we had a recently warrior trial that was a good tank and did perform well, but ended failing the trial because he hardly spoke and understand English, we really tried to make it work, me being raid leader and Portuguese and with him being Portuguese, I could explain the tactics and what he was supposed to be doing and while taxing it kinda worked. The problems appeared when or I was not in raid (and some Karazhan raids we did on off time, really went wrong with raid members not being able to communicat with him decently) or when there was a quick need to adpat in middle of fights, the other warriors could not communicate with him fast enough with telling me and me having to translate.

Only way for a raid to work is if eveyrone at least understand one language and raid sticks to it, we have several "swedish" guilds on the server that while are not only for swedish people they require everyone to speak and understand swedish on the raids. There is also a multitude of country specific guilds on every european server I think, I know that Frostmane has at guilds for almost all countries in Europe.

On a derail, Blizzard should really had done different Time Zone servers in Europe.

I play on a European English Realm, Turalyon EU. I promise to get to the point wrt the OP as quickly as I can too.

The majority of players on this realm are from mainland Europe and Scandinavia.
English is the accepted language on there, if there was no tacit agreement like this from all the players communication would be generally impossible.

This seems to work for the majority of Guilds there. There are some specific language Guilds, notably Russian, Dutch and Scandinavian ones.
Most guilds specify that their members use a specific language in all guild wide activities be it on their forums, /g or on Vent/TS. Fluency may not be required but the ability to understand and communicate well enough are generally the standards Guilds set for this.

In Raids clear communication is essential, without it things break down. This is one reason why VoIP is used, it is a lot more efficient than typing.

I have been in a Raiding Guild where, despite the clear requirement that applicants must be fluent in both written and spoken English. members were allowed to trial and even become members when their English skills were products of copy&pasting stuff through google. The fault lay with the people making the decisions to let them in.
The result was an enormous amount of friction, time wasting and the eventual collapse of the Guild.

Yes, multi-language Guilds can work. They do work.
But for activities like Raiding having a standard language which everyone can communicate in effectively is essential. Without that things are unlikely to work.

I have no experience of being in a Guild with someone who has hearing difficulties. While not the same by any means I could imagine it being similar to having someone who is unable to or refuses to use VoIP.
Does it add to the challenge of Raiding? Of course it does, things can take longer to explain through the keyboard.
But the fact that a common language is being used is far more important, in the end, than the method by which people communicate.

We are basicly in the same situation as a handfull of posters above me.
As a european guild on an English server, we cater to a variety of people from alot of different countries. It ranges from the United Kingdom, finland, Russia, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and many more.
Language is hardly a problem as we all speak proper english and that is the language in wich we communicate. Be it in raids, fora or guildchat.

The other large horde guild on our server is German by nature tough.
They did open the guild up to people from other countries and handle everything in English as far as I know for some time now.

Slightly offtopic; Apart from a possible language barrier do guilds experiance cultural barriers?

I've never experienced any culture barrier, internet seems to evaporate such things. In our guild you get treated like anyone else regardless of nationality, gender or religion. Of course we joke around with "dutch dinners", swenglish, welsh sheep fuckers and finnish people being blood sucking vampires, but its all in good fun and no one takes offense.

I guess its all about the atmosphere you promote in the guild, we do our best to break up cliques and integrate everyone into the guild. If you have everyone feeling like they are part of a big family theres not really any problems with different cultures or languages or what have you.

My guild was mostly French (being myself from Quebec but living in Paris) but we had people from Belgium (walloons), Switzerland and Portugal. The Swiss were not all native French speakers (italian). As for the Portuguese, they had one of them who was very fluent in French to translate instructions when they got a bit complex.

I never felt like the language was a real obstacle. On some occasions I would have liked that the Portuguese rogue could have explained directly why he was dying/underperforming/etc but all in all, it went smoothly. For some players, English was the second language so even if all the briefings and instructions were in French, we sometimes translated for them (mainly via /w).

And of course, the guild channel was left free of any language restriction.

The majority of EU (English realms) guilds are multilingual (with English as the default language), although there are a lot of 'Danish Knights' or 'Dutch Clan's around as well, in my experience these usually appear as social guilds, since just being of that nationality is enough of a reason to get a guild invite.

There is a danger of creating cliques based on nationalities, seemingly more so with languages further removed from English (Greek, Czech, Latin languages). I've experienced one episode where a majority of guild officers and important people were all of the same nationality. There would be times during raids when they started discussing tactics (or were just fooling around and laughing) in their own language, which sort of alienated the rest of the attendees. Eventually they all left as a group to greener pastures. But generally speaking, nationality is of little importance. Half the time you don't even know where player X is from. I've certainly seen British players with worse English than the average European player.

But it is a lot of fun, really. We're learning a few basic words and silly things to say in eachother's languages. At one time, the Greeks convinced some of us that 'malaka' was a friendly greeting...

I've heard stories of some EU realms (and perhaps US realms...) having become 'unofficial' single-language realms. In the EU, there are apparently several realms wich have become de facto Russian realms. Does the US have anything like this? I suspect there may be a lot of Spanish/Latin-speaking players in the US?

Supposedly one out of every four persons in the world speaks english. Or at least can make him/herself understandable in english.

Supposedly only one out of every four of those has english as their native language. That means that the non-native english speakers outrank them 1 to 3, and thereby slowly start to become the "true owners" of the english language.

English in the 21st century is what Latin was in the 15th century. The one language spoken amongst educated people from different countries. Will English stay in that position ? We don't know. For sure Latin didn't maintain its popularity.
Language translation programs are still pretty limited. But there is continuous progress. In the future we might have instant spoken translations between any pair of languages. Maybe as a plugin for your voice communication software. That would remove the need for a common language. And it might take away the special status that the English language has today.

My guild has had a number of different languages, but most seem to speak English well enough. It isn't uncommon for us to hear French on vent, a couple members were from Puerto Rico, one is Thai, another Vietnamese, and a couple from Holland. The only guy that could not legitimately speak English well enough for us to communicate with was from Iran. Luckily he joined with his cousin who lived in the US so he translated a lot for him, and I tried to speak what little Farsi I could remember from classes and friends (though when most of your vocabulary consists of insults, it is a little difficult to communicate raid orders).

In the end the guy from Iran left the guild because he was never around (him and his cousin never got out of the initiate phase, and even pulled a bait and switch on what class he was recruited to play). I think one of the biggest issues is that no one really got to know either of them because they kept to themselves a lot, especially the guy who spoke as little English as I did Farsi. It can be rough, but I think when you have serious language barriers it can be very detrimental, because these games require solid communication and coordination at the raiding and arena level. Usually they work themselves out, and people go to a guild or server where more people may speak their language. Or they may use it as an opportunity to get better at whatever language the people in their guild are speaking.

When I first started WoW (I was a few hrs to miss signing the charter of our guild on day 1) on a dif char on a dif server I was the only native English speaker in my guild. In fact I was the only non scandanavian in my guild for a good few weeks until some other non scandanavian people got brought in. Although everyone spoke English very well every now and then they all joked around in chat or on the forums in another language (mainly Norwegian). Which did make me feel left out a bit, but meh I didn't care that much :p

However as we started raiding MC, BWl etc everything became exclusively English on forums and in TS chat. Only a very occasional bit of Norwegian or Swedish came over the air waves and that mainly due to someone being drunk :-)

Well of course most of the EU raiding guilds are multi national but English is always the language that is used in guild chat and in raids. The only successful non multi national raiding guilds I know of are Swedish.

I've experienced problems with Greek and Spanish players when it comes to English, many of them have a hard time writing and speaking English.