IAWLS Members and Languages

June 27, 2008

Our association has now 280 individual members from 26 countries. The following table shows the numbers of members from each country.

The first and striking observation is the huge number of members from USA, compared to the traditional XC countries of Finland, Sweden and Norway. One could possibly expect numbers proportional to the number of multiple Worldloppet Masters (we will soon publish the updated statistics of “The Most Assiduous WL Nations”) but the above table is totally biased with respect to that criterion.

The explanation is easily found when we observe that also Australia, Canada and Great Britain have large numbers of members compared to the big XC countries in Europe. We have chosen English as the language used on our web site. This is discriminatory towards the countries that don’t have English as the national language. Native English speakers usually don’t realize how difficult it is for people with a different language to understand English and even worse, to send a message in English. Take an example: to become a member of IAWLS you have to click on Membership on our web site and go to the sign up procedure. What is sign up? We are accustomed to sign letters on the bottom, but what on the earth does it mean to do it up?   In other words, already the sign up procedure is a dilemma and may be repulsive.

If we had a multilingual website, we could expect to have at least 100 members from each of the Nordic countries, and many more members from France, Germany and Italy than from Australia. We should have all texts in at least the following languages in addition to English: Finnish, French, German, Italian and Swedish. But we hope our members will understand that that would be a huge effort, beyond the capabilities of the Committee at this time.

Don’t be afraid of writing to us in your personal English. We also remind you that the Committee is able to read messages in 11 languages.

This page was last revised on August 21, 2008