Russian Volga-Hydrofoil-Owners awake!

[Georg Weinstabl]

Zdrastvutje,

Unfortunately this is one of the few words I know in Russian. This is an international site and we are also looking for Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian and other former USSR country Members in our site. A Volga Hyrdofoil stands for a unique way to approach boatbuilding for runabouts. It is without question a very valuable contribution to the boating world by Russian Engineers, that were leading worldwide with this outstanding engineering. But where are those Russians now?

Your heart should be filled with proudness seing that there is an international fan-site of your country's product and should gladly provide all kind of information about your Volga-Hydrofoils. What is such Fan-Site, without having Russian or other former USSR-country members contributing with their statements and showing off their boats? Forgive me, to ask so directly, but ... do you see it as correct, that you leave commenting on Volgas and valueing your Hydrofoils only to Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Americans, Germans, Croatians and Turks?

We are looking forward to see you in our site. Our language is not only English, you may also write in Russian or other languages ... There is nowadays a google-translator (or-what-ever-translators) and we might be able to understand each other somehow.

Best regards,

[Volga70]

Bravo!

Thank you, Georg, for your message well said. From this website's statistics page I can see that relatively most visitors come from Russia and GOS countries. The same applies to the Volga movies that have been put on YouTube. But there are very few messages on this message board coming from these countries, while most knowledge about these great boats is probably there!

I therefore added support for a lot more languages, to make it more easy to use this forum. Another thing that we're working on, is to make the gallery a user-friendly place where all you Volga enthusiasts can post your images and share your stories. The final step is to create 'welcome' pages in as many different languages as possible, and somehow to integrate an online translator, in the hope that this site can become a true cross-border gathering place where everyone can read and share in their own language. Well, sort of - the online translators are still not perfect, so we'll probably need to be creative to understand some of the crooked translations this will give us,

But the most important thing is that it is a joint effort. I started this site because there was a lack of information available to me (that is, in a language that I can understand). Until now this website attracted many people from all over the world who are interested in these coolest of boats, but all written texts are in English, and this clearly does not contribute to make this website truly cross-border. I am currently writing a "Word of Welcome" directed to our Russian speaking friends, in the hope that they will join the discussions. My father-in-law speaks Russian fluently, and will help with the translation (or so I heard). This is hopefully a first step towards a truly inter-national gathering place for all things Volga.

Cheers and Nazdarovya!

PS. Does anyone here speak Wiki?

[sandflite]

Hi guys!

Thanks for being keen on that unique vessel. Dr.R.Alekseev is genius for sure! I'm really proud of him.
You're right, the main reason why there's no 'bears' in here is language. We've got an internal forum in Russian:
http://katera.ru/forum/index.php?showfo ... r=all&st=0
.........and a lot of boats still afloat.
Good luck to every 'Volgalover' on the planet!

P.S. Any questions are welcome.