
Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese - jaydles
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/ola-mundo-announcing-stack-overflow-in-portuguese/
======
crb
Interesting to see the change from 2009, in the Stack Overflow podcast 48:
[http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/podcast-48/](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/podcast-48/)

 _> One reason localization has been a very low priority is that we feel for
our particular audience, namely programmers, English is the de facto standard
language. Not that other languages aren’t important, but it’s easier to get
engineering work done when everything coalesces around a standard language._

 _> Joel believes that there are five “important” languages that programming
content should eventually be localized into: German, Spanish, French, Chinese,
and Japanese._

~~~
Dewie
Yes, I was very surprised by this move.

> >One reason localization has been a very low priority is that we feel for
> our particular audience, namely programmers, English is the de facto
> standard language. Not that other languages aren’t important, but it’s
> easier to get engineering work done when everything coalesces around a
> standard language.

I'm gonna assume that Jeff Atwood said this. Does he speak more than one
language? Because although how reasonable it seems that English is incredibly
widespread among programmers, I think that any monolingual English speaker is
going to have a very biased perception of the English literacy of programmers
in a more international setting.

I have no problem believing that English is the most widespread auxiliary
language in programming. But I'm not so sure about what percentage of
programmers worldwide speak or write English, which the given quote seems to
implicitly make a statement about.

------
venomsnake
That could backfire badly (disclaimer - English is my second language, so I
suppose I don't have some superiority complex). Fragmenting knowledge doesn't
give much benefit. English is the standard language for the IT for better or
worse. Right now a small investment of learning technical English (you need
probably 1000 words and rudimentary grammar to be able to search and even
contribute) could pay off a lot.

If we are to share knowledge we must speak a common language. A much better
use of resources would have been intensive English for IT learning program
that could bring people to speed.

And the high quality content found on the Brazilian SO will have hard time
finding its way to the main site.

~~~
bnegreve
> Fragmenting knowledge doesn't give much benefit.

What about Wikipedia? I think they are benefiting from being multi-language.

> English is the standard language for the IT for better or worse.

All programmers are certainly not fluent in english. Reading
code/documentation is one thing, having a discussion / asking a question is
different.

Most non native english speakers probably don't feel confident enough to ask
questions on english speaking forums like SO.

~~~
reubenmorais
> Most non native english speakers probably don't feel confident enough to ask
> questions on english speaking forums like SO.

On the flip side, people are feeling _too_ confident about asking questions on
pt.stackoverflow.com, lowering the SNR quite a bit. But I don't know how
English SO was at the beginning, and I wouldn't be surprised if it also took
them a while to establish the current quality standards.

~~~
ufo
The more restrictive rules came as the community grew and matured. The early
days of SO were very different from now. You can see this everytime someone
links to a popular old question here on HN: there is always a comment
complaining that the question is closed as non constructive and that So isn't
as good as it used to be :)

------
phowat
If you're a programmer and you're not comfortable with english, you better
become. Fast. There's just no way around it and I think it's a good thing, it
means less fragmentation of knowledge. Remember when Nginx documentation was
almost entirely in russian? Yeah, it sucked.

ps: English is not my first language

~~~
stingraycharles
Yeah, it's even worse when people use their native language in code comments
or, god forbid, variable names. There suddenly is no way of collaboration with
people who aren't familiar with your native language.

~~~
Adirael
I once inherited an spaghetti PHP project with everything (code, comments and
documentation) written in swedish. It was awful.

------
specialp
When I was at Stack Overflow's offices on a tour they said that most
developers speak English, but they found that Brazil and Japan had much higher
numbers of developers that only spoke their native language. This was about 6
months ago. I think it is a good thing as most of these people that would use
the Portuguese version would probably not use the English one anyway so it is
not as if information is being lost.

------
jcrei
According to the blog post:

Queríamos começar com uma comunidade que atendesse a dois requisitos:

1) Um grande número de desenvolvedores talentosos, em que 2) Grande parte
deles se sentisse muito mais confortável em falar sua própria língua do que o
inglês

Which roughly translates to: We wanted to start with a community that
fulfilled two criteria: 1) A large number of talented developers in which, 2)
A large part of them would be much more comfortable speaking their own
language instead of english.

Then they have a map with visitors per month from Portuguese speaking
countries: Brazil: 3.4M, Portugal 1M, plus Angola, Mozambique and other
smaller countries with some visitors per month.

~~~
icebraining
They have 1M visitors form Portugal?! How is that possible? The country as a
whole only has ~10M people, and as a Portuguese programmer working here
myself, I don't think we have an extraordinary number of programmers per
capita.

Quantcast shows ~200K uniques from Portugal, which seems much closer to
reality.

------
biscarch
I'd be interested to know if this means I should start searching both sites
when looking for answers (or how that issue is going to be solved). Should I
have accounts on both so I can upvote answers? My Spanish certainly doesn't
qualify me to answer questions in Portuguese; Reading, however, is a better
prospect.

It seems interesting that this is so separated from the main Q&A database of
questions when so much of the information is easily accessible with tools like
Google Translate and knowledge of similar languages (Spanish, for example).

------
buzaga41
I think it will be a niche.

People forget that most people working in software are in corporate jobs(or
`website jobs` e.g.: PHP+Jquery), and there lies most people that don't care
that much about perfecting the skills etc, i.e.: People that take it as a job
and not a craft(and I'm fine with this, honestly)

So this may capture lower grade q and a's but it doesn't matter.. for example,
I do speak english and it's very probable that I won't use much
pt.stackoverflow if at all, just like I didn't browse the countless brasilian
PHP, Java, JQuery, RoR forums and `Something-BR` discussion lists and groups
before, but the people in there may do

So in my opinion it's irrelevant what you say about English being such a must
and that it won't be as high-quality, to the people that will use it, it will
be useful

To be a 'development is my craft' kind in fact English is essential, but
that's just a small slice of the pie, to SO, it's business, or am I wrong?

~~~
darrenkopp
When I was interviewing with Stack Exchange, one of the employees there made
this off-hand comment (not direct quote, but probably close): "Brazil is
seeing a lot of out sourcing work with high quality output but for whatever
reason they just don't seem that interested in learning English, so we are
localizing the site"

~~~
outworlder
That is a huge generalization. The developers that are closest to me all have
English proficiency to some degree. But that's a biased sample, so I am
inclined to agree with the statement.

As a brazilian, I am not sure why that is, but I can make some guesses:

\- Public education sucks (at least before you get to the university level) so
we can just disregard that.

\- Top private schools are outstanding. There's a lot of competition to get in
the public universities, so the competition is fierce, among students and
schools. However, that doesn't apply to English _at all_. They'll teach the
english text comprehension skills required to get into a university and
nothing more. I am sure there are exceptions, but that seems to be the rule.

\- Private English courses range from terrible to great. There are several
reasons for that, but that difference is not always reflected in their cost
and it is not trivial to tell them apart. It usually takes several years to
get from zero to a level where the student can talk to a native speaker. It is
entirely possible for someone to enroll in a Comp. Sci course and an English
one at the same time, and finish Comp. Sci, while being halfway through the
English one.

I am not sure how that compares to the rest of the world. But the perception
is that learning English takes a lot of effort, and "I'm already employed, so
why bother?". The issue here obviously is that it shouldn't take that much
time - we are not interested in fluency here - but if it did, then the
opportunity cost would be too high indeed.

People only start taking English seriously when they get outside offers (which
they fail to qualify), or start working for a company with foreign clients. By
then, it is too late.

The advice I give to everyone is to make English the number one priority, but
don't bother too much with formal schools. Things like movies, CNN and online
games (with VOIP) can teach you the basics much faster. And most importantly,
train the ears to recognize English phonemes. After that, you can get a
teacher/institution to fill in the gaps. That saves a lot of time, because
you'll rank much higher in placement tests, shaving whole _years_ of slow
learning.

As for the new site, I believe it will become an island of people that are
unwilling to learn English. I am not sure what that says about their
willingness to learn anything else...

~~~
darrenkopp
It definitely is, I don't think the person who said it was really covering all
the subtleties of the statement, they were just answering my question to them
as to why they chose Portuguese to be the first localized stackoverflow site.

------
speeder
I am from Brazil, and although I understand the "dangers" of this idea (like
community fragmentation, and why not other widely spoken languages, like
Hindi) I really like the initiative.

Although as you can see from this text, I can read and write english, I am a
absolute minority in Brazil, most people here don't understand english at ALL,
just look at the map in the post, they had 3.4M Brazillian visitors, and 1M
Portuguese visitors, but Brazil has 200 million people, portugal has 10
million people, this means that Brazil with literally 20 times more people
than Portugal, can only have 3 times the visits on a english speaking site.

Compare this to Brazil own internet use, Brazil is one of the countries with
widest internet use, its internet culture resemble Japan and China, where it
has a very strong "local" internet, because people don't know any other
foreign language.

Some people might say: "But to code you must know english!" Well, you don't, I
started coding when I was 6 years old, taught by my dad, that still does not
know english, what happen in those cases, is that keywords (like goto, print,
etc...) are just that, keywords, they are like mantra, enchantments, magic
words that you type, and the computer do something, when I learned GWBASIC I
had no idea what "if, else, then" meant, except they were mandatory when I
wanted to control program flow, I had no idea what "GOTO" means, except that
it made the program jump to somewhere else, the first time I saw "GOTO"
written as "go to" I was amazed to learn that it was actually two words!

And this still stands, my dad, and most of my co-workers (I worked once in a
company with 40 programmers, only 4 knew english), they might even search
stuff in google in english, but usually they do this for example by copying
and pasting errors from the compiler, the error is in english, but they have
no idea what is the literal meaning or translation, and after the search is
done, they use google translate.

Portuguese language programming groups are very strong here, for example I am
in the C++, Android, Lua and some other mailing lists, there is almost no
connection between those lists and the english language ones, because the
overlap is too thin, few people in the portuguese speaking lists know english,
and the ones that DO know english, keep themselves to english lists because of
higher volume and content.

I expect that pt.so will take some time to reach the original SO quality, but
I also expect it to mean much for brazillian community.

And curse you SO devs, I wanted to make that as my startup! :P (I am half-
serious, if I had time I would have made PT SO myself)

------
donquichotte
I wonder why they chose Portugese. Unfortunately, I can't read the blog post.
The map seems to indicate that the number of speakers is important, but that
can't be it, there's many more Mandarin/Hindi/Arabic speakers. Does anybody
have information on this?

~~~
rglullis
It's a mix of market demand and potential. China has all the clones, so
Mandarin-speaking people already have their Q/A equivalent.

India (mostly) speaks english at a level that allows them to participate in
the "original" Stackoverflow.

Arabic? As much as there is a big population, I would venture that there is
not enough demand.

Brazil, OTOH, is a reasonably industrialized country with some industries that
are quite advanced: Genomics and Banking come to mind. It has the 3rd or 4th
largest telecommunications infrastructure in the world. Put that together with
the fact they can't speak English that well and you have a big under-served
audience.

Though the cynic in me thinks that this is just a way to contain the pesky
Brazilians, who are known for not being exactly civil in online communities.
By letting the less educated Brazilians have their own yard, they won't do as
much damage to the main property.

Ps: shout out to Gabriel (Gabe). He worked with us for a year or so and it was
a pleasure to have him on the team. Great guy, super smart and zero ego.

~~~
marcosdumay
Is Arabic even a single language? (I really don't know.)

But I don't think it's in the SO best interest to contain any group. They
already have a moderation system for dealing with anoying people. I'd put that
cinic at rest.

What this will achieve is making learning to program much easier for
portugueese speaking people. A much needed thing. But I doubt that anybody
will stop searching problems in english, just the sheer number and selection
bias are enough to keep the best content in english.

Anyway, great icon. Stack Overflow with cedilha!

~~~
mchaver
Written Arabic can be considered one language. Spoken varieties are not
mutually intelligible and do not generally have standardized written forms,
though many Arabic speakers can understand Egyptian Arabic do to popularity of
their media.

------
mekishizufu
From Google Translate:

> The basic questions - those that once plagued every programmer - have not
> yet been made. You can write a question or definitive answer that will help
> tens of thousands of programmers in the future. (Oh, and do not worry if
> your question is already on the site in English.'ll Build you a website just
> for developers who speak Portuguese no longer need to use English to learn
> new things!)

Why not just provide machine translated versions of the original English
questions with option to improve the translation?

I think that creating a brand new site will just split the large SO community
and won't achieve much. Especially since you drastically limit the audience
willing/able to answer the question.

~~~
UweSchmidt
Agree on the split-problem. There is no way I could be satisfied with anything
but the best ressource with the largest community, so I'd go great lenghts to
decipher the greater wisdom.

However machine translation isn't quite there yet (judging by the quality of
Microsoft's MSDN-articles translated into German). The topics I read about
there, or on Stackoverflow are by definition situated right at the border of
my current understanding; a few translation ambiguities or odd word choices
push it over the edge and I might not "get" it.

So I doubt building a community on machine-translated articles would work.

------
kroger
Wow, I'm surprised by some of the comments here and on SO. Talk about
promoting diversity!

For people saying that programmers need to know English. I agree, I speak
English as a second language myself. However, learning English is not easy for
everybody as isn't learning programming. Some people find easier to learn
something in their native language. They can learn English later. Also, you
can be a good programmer without speaking English at all, provided you have
access to learning material. (Naturally, speaking English will be a huge
advantage)

In the 1600s you had to speak Italian fluently if you wanted to be a musician.
Today you can learn the meaning of words like "forte" and "stringendo",
without having to really speak Italian. Programming is pretty much the same;
one can learn the meaning of things like "if" and "function" and learn the big
concepts (abstraction, algorithms, etc) in their language.

EDIT: formatting

~~~
noname123
It's interesting that you use music as the example. Music has its own notation
(sheet music, rhythmic units of melodies/pauses in measurements of bars),
ingredients (scales/keys/modes) that is really independent of any language.

Code I suppose when you boil down to it is just a higher-level, human-readable
representation of a set of logic operations that can be represented by logical
operators. Of course, most programmers don't grow to learn that way but by
hacking when they are young and groking the big concepts as you say, like Zen
buddhists rumminating on weeks on koans under the guidance of the abbots of
the temple (HN, Github, listserv, irc etc.)

I suppose that's the difference between looking at the two things as symbols
operations or a narrative. So I offer the following koan, is it necessary to
know the history of the Mississippi Delta or the ethics of Linus/RMS to be
able to fully play the Blues or contribute a patch to the Linux Kernel?

------
swah
This is interesting, although most of my colleagues won't google problems in
Portuguese.

~~~
rabc
Brazilian developers don't google in portuguese because they know it'll always
be faster to search in english, but I have seen a lot of developers struggling
to find the answer in english because they can't understand and don't know how
to search.

~~~
speeder
This...

My dad is one of the best programmers I ever saw, and he tried VERY, VERY,
VERY hard for 30 years already, and don't understand english at all.

What he do is search in english (or try to), and then use google translate to
read the results.

Also I once worked in a company with 40 programmers, only 4 could read and
write in english well enough to use StackOverflow, the others knew only the
programming language keywords (in the sense of what they did even, not what
they meant in english), and sometimes barely enough to use english google +
google translate.

------
krispyfi
Great! Now do Japanese!

(Or pull a reverse-Cookpad and professionally translate the best answers.)

~~~
rtpg
I find the fact that so much technical literature is translated to Japanese
really fascinating.

I'm not sure whether it's because of the generally poor level of English
comprehension, or just that Japanese techies buy a lot of books. In any case
O'Reilly seems happy about it.

------
danbruc
I do not like that. One world, one language. Preferably English. How cool
would that be? No more language barriers. English is not my first language.

~~~
outworlder
Why does it have to be English? Why not Esperanto?

That let us drop the political implications, and also use an 'engineered
language', with an easier learning curve.

------
robteix
I can't imagine ever searching for a solution to a problem in Portuguese. I
never google in Portuguese, ever. Content quality is just abismal.

~~~
ufo
You know very well that _a lot_ of people in Brazil have really bad english
and even though they might be able to read some english pages they are going
to have a hard time asking SO questions.

~~~
icebraining
_You know very well_

How would you know that? Not every Portuguese speaking user here in from
Brazil, and as one of them, frankly I don't have any idea of the English
proficiency of Brazilian programmers.

~~~
ufo
Well, there is a good chance he is Brazilian since we are so numerous and yes,
lots of people here do speak and write english very badly, even in the
programmer community. Its actually a pretty big problem. But even if he were
from Portugal I would also guess he should be aware of that (and I imagine the
english speaking problem is not going to be better in Angola or Mozambique)

------
rogerthis
It will be a mess. [A lot of] brazilian programmers can't write our own
[portuguese] language correctly. Every technical forum in portuguese is filled
with teenage language and internetic/chatic abbreviations. I'll stay away from
that.

But I understand the initiative. If brazilians can't write in portuguese,
imagine their english.

------
pmelendez
This is great... I always feel the need of this for Spanish.

The think is that stackoverflow is a great resource and even when it is true
that English is the standard language in software, it is also true that a lot
of developers living in non-english speaking countries don't domain the
language, this is specially true if they are teenagers.

~~~
Dewie
> , this is specially true if they are teenagers.

Good point. Many on here talk about how they got started programming when they
were 12 or whatever; I don't know how fast kids learn a foreign language like
English these days, but it will certainly vary by country, and for them to
have more resources in their own tongue could make programming much more
approachable.

------
michaelmcmillan
The majority of SQL injection vulnerabilities found by searching for
unsanitized input at GitHub is by Portugese or Spanish users, especially in
PHP. I am not trying to generalize, but it seems to me that a StackOverflow in
Portugese perhaps is not such a bad idea.

~~~
rcruzeiro
Any source for this statement? I ask this because Portugal has a population of
10.5 million people while Brazil has 201 million people and both have
Portuguese as the official language.

~~~
michaelmcmillan
I am sorry, I was unclear: The code seems to be often commented in Portugese
or Spanish, I do not know which specific country they are from.

My statement may seem false if you only inspect the first pages. Though I seem
to remember that the majority of the exploitable repositories were in fact
Portugese or Spanish.

Source:
[https://github.com/search?q=mysql+%24_GET&type=Code&ref=sear...](https://github.com/search?q=mysql+%24_GET&type=Code&ref=searchresults)

------
slig
I've seen people post technical questions on Facebook groups like "Jquery
Brasil" (sic), by describing the problem/error and attaching an screenshot of
the source code.

So, yeah, there's a lot of potential for this.

~~~
ionforce
FYI, Brasil is how you spell Brazil in Portuguese.

"I am from Brazil." // "Sou do Brasil."

More fun fact, it's pronounced brah-zew like you're saying eww gross.

~~~
slig
Thanks, but what I meant with the "sic" was that jQuery was written as
"Jquery".

------
ufo
I wonder why they made it into a totally separate site. I think it would be
nice if it could share the same favourite tags as the english version or if I
could browse both languages in a single page.

------
danabramov
Weird there's no number for Russia on the map. I thought SO scores a lot of
Russian visitors (many of whom satisfy those two criteria).

~~~
ufo
The map was just for Portuguese-speaking countries.

~~~
danabramov
Ah, that explains it! Thanks.

------
beefhash
Please forgive me, I just have to.

BR? BR? BR? gibe moni plos.

------
oscargrouch
muito bom!

------
Dewie
Many are saying that this is a bad idea and ending their comment with "and I
say this as a non-native English speaker", but since you had to explicitly
tell us this fact, you are not the kind of person who needs any kind of non-
English SO or whatever! If your English is good enough to be (at times)
indistinguishable from a native speaker, you are in as good a position as any
native English speaker, on the Internet.

Maybe you are in a position to have more sympathy with people who can't speak
English, since you used to be in that same boat. But it's not as if having an
English-only programming community is of any detriment to _you_ , personally.

