
Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese? - jaydles
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/02/cant-we-all-be-reasonable-and-speak-english/
======
soneca
_" It’s almost impossible to feel like part of a community if you’re not
highly proficient in the language. Even non-native speakers who are fluent
enough to read posts in their second or third languages often aren’t
comfortable enough to write in them."_

Wow, this is true! I am brazilian and you have no idea how much effort I put
in writing every single comment here on HN. And the longer de comment is, the
more stupid mistakes I make; e.g., i usually write "no" instead of "know" or
vice-versa, just because in my brazilian mind they sound exactly the same. And
at my most voted comment ever I wrote "maked" instead of "made". No one
mentioned (?) it, but I still feel the shame.

I think it is a great move by SO, lots and lots of developers I meet here (i
am not one) don't speak fluent english. Our basic education is very poor (in
every aspect, including english language there). If we want a world where
everyone can learn to code/develop early in life, this sure come in hand in
Brazil, where there is a huge just-got-out-of-poverty youth that didn't learn
english at all, but could easily learn to code.

Congrats SO!

edit: I noticed I just wrote "de" instead of "the". Stupidest mistake I often
make. Again, just because in my mind they sound exactly the same - and "de" is
a word ( _of_ ) in portuguese. Gosh, I make this mistake for so long, I should
have learned already.

~~~
zanny
There is a real brutal grammar nazi trend I've been seeing recently on various
sites - apparently, someone gets a buzz of self entitled superiority off of
correcting someones grammar mistakes.

Personally? I think English is insanely stupid, inefficient, and dumb. I speak
it because I have to, not because I want to, because everyone else does it. If
you think trying to get breakout success in a market with, say, a software
product is, try thinking of a way to create an "optimal" language (ie, glyphs
only trace to possible human vocalization, but it covers the entire range -
English doesn't, for example. And your words are a huffman tree - the most
popular ones are the shortest, though that can only ever be realized when the
language is conceived since the common vernacular shifts over time).

Now try to figure out how to get _that_ market penetration.

~~~
gbog
> create an "optimal" language (ie, glyphs only trace to possible human
> vocalization

There comes Chinese characters, which are exactly the opposite of your
definition of "optimal": Chinese characters are not an alphabet, they do not
carry phonetics, they carry meaning. And, guess what, this is arguably better.

Why? Because phonetics tend to shift quickly. In a few decennies any spoken
language has shifted, vocalisation is different, especially when the language
is used by loosely coulped communities. And then you have to adapt spelling to
new pronunciations. But what do you do with old books? And how do you keep the
language united? Chinese characters, by allowing different pronunciations
without changing their written form, do fix this issue. This has helped China
to stay centralized for a long time, and share one common continuous cultural
ground.

So, if optimal means "can be shared by more people for a longer period of
time" maybe the optimal language would need to add an articulation, and
represent meanings instead of sounds.

~~~
lunchbox
> _Chinese characters are not an alphabet, they do not carry phonetics, they
> carry meaning. And, guess what, this is arguably better. Why? Because
> phonetics tend to shift quickly._

But I would think (and remember reading somewhere) that phonetics shift more
quickly where there is no written record of the pronunciation. Chinese has
dozens of mutually unintelligible dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Hakka,
etc.). Maybe this fragmentation would be much less if they had a phonetic
writing system in the first place.

> _In a few decennies any spoken language has shifted, vocalisation is
> different, especially when the language is used by loosely coulped
> communities. And then you have to adapt spelling to new pronunciations. But
> what do you do with old books? And how do you keep the language united?_

English (or Spanish, etc) is a real-world example of a mostly phonetic writing
system, and I don't think it is that bad. We can still read old texts, even
though our pronunciation of the words has changed vastly. If you go back far
enough (e.g. to the time of Chaucer in the 1300s), it becomes hard to
understand what is being said, but practically speaking I don't see this as a
big problem. In contrast, I think it's very important to have a writing system
that is easily learned, so that it is accessible to the entire population (not
just those able to invest lots of time & effort).

~~~
ithkuil
> If you go back far enough (e.g. to the time of Chaucer in the 1300s), it
> becomes hard to understand what is being said

That's because at that time they still wrote phonetically. Today the spelling
of some languages, like English especially, is fixed and immutable yet the
pronunciation diverges.

Think about equATION and pronunciATION (or any other word ending in -ation
that has "ʒ" instead of "ʃ").

There is also the reverse effect. Spelling influences pronunciation.
Especially the sounds of single vowels (a,e,i,o,u), their sound being used
frequently when spelling, becomes a guide to pronounce unfamiliar words,
making words like "fungae" sounds nothing like what the latin word used to be
(and how it was probably pronounced by english speaking educated people in the
middle ages).

That said, even a crippled phonetic alphabet is certainly easier to learn than
ideograms. However English is at the worst end of the spectrum. Japanese
syllabic writing systems (hiragana and katakana) are much easier to write even
if they have a few more glyphs. Unfortunately, even if you master -kana
scripts, and thus able to write everything you want in Japanese, you'd be cut
off from mainstream culture, including newspapers street signs etc

------
oscargrouch
People barely now this, but theres a social inclusion aspect by creating the
portuguese version of StackOverflow.

In Brazil, at least, only the kids of wealthy families have access to private
english courses..

In regular school its just too weak to make a difference.. and of course there
are the self-taughts.. a minority..

So, there are a very good social inclusion aspect in all of this.. make the
rookie programmers start with the portuguese version.. then maybe they will
just hit the english with time.. imposing a language barrier is a sort of
elitism that will create a virtual barrier that doesnt do good to anyone..

I dont know why people rant about it, since all the good content is already in
english language..

Allow even more people to enter into the technology world is a good thing..
let them learn english later, when theres a need..

~~~
gorrillamcd
This! People aren't realizing that in a lot of countries, english classes in
the normal school system are a joke. And there are many people that don't have
the resources to go to college or private classes to learn this. I have some
young friends in Mexico that don't even have assurance of their next meal and
would like to learn some skills to help land a better job than washing cars,
but they're stuck. It's a catch-22 and having programming information and
curriculum in their native language would remove one more barrier to them
getting out of that situation. It'd also help me teach them since I wouldn't
have to translate so much.

------
te_platt
I have strongly mixed feelings on this. When I was a kid my family moved to
Brazil for a couple of years and I learned Portuguese. When I was about 20 I
moved to Chile and learned Spanish. Speaking the language of the culture you
are in is hugely important - and not very easy.

So on the one hand if the culture of programming is in English (is it?) then I
would strongly encourage anyone wanting to program to learn English. On the
other hand, helping inject a programming environment into another language
seems a worthy goal as well. On balance it seems like stackoverflow is doing
the right thing.

~~~
astrodust
While learning English will help immeasurably when you're learning to program,
the languages themselves are often highly English-baed, trying to tackle
programming and English at the same time makes for quite a barrier.

Since being able to ask difficult, technical questions in your native language
would make it easier to learn, I don't see what's so bad about that. Yes, it
fragments the community, but it also recognizes that the world is not English
only. Right now there's large Chinese, Russian, Japanese, and French
communities that are second-class citizens without a tool like Stack Overflow.

~~~
azernik
The connection between programming languages and English is highly
exaggerated. Programming language syntax is generally nothing like natural
language syntax, and programming language vocabulary (keywords, data
structures, standard library names) is usually completely divorced from
similar-sounding or similar-spelled words in English.

~~~
astrodust
The biggest problem I've seen is that a lot of the words have subtle meaning
and the jargon used to describe the theory is often difficult or impossible to
translate.

For example, a "stack" or a "filter" or a "queue" all have specific meanings
outside of programming, their nature hints at how they work, even if the
technical meaning is obviously different.

Not knowing what any of the things were leaves you with a hazy concept of what
they are until you understand their English analog.

I still think it makes sense to try and explain concepts in the language in
which one is most proficient, then worry about English later.

------
drdaeman
> We do want as much centralization as possible

Yup, totally centralized. Spent half an hour figuring out where my question
should go (StackOverflow vs Programming vs ServerFault vs SuperUser vs Ubuntu
vs Unix-and-Linux). Ended up not asking the question at all.

Shall they open some foreign embassies, I guess users'll spend 10 minutes more
deciding in which language should they ask (i.e. whenever they prefer native
language or bigger community) or duplicate the question.

~~~
fabian2k
The only difficult difference here is Stack Overflow vs Programming, the
others are pretty descriptive. The difference is not too hard to understand,
but still not intuitive for a new user.

There is also some overlap, so if you have a question about Ubuntu you can
also ask it on Unix&Linux.

~~~
drdaeman
For me, Stack Overflow vs Programming is easiest to understand - it's whenever
the question is about implementation or theory. But some areas, for example,
packaging, lie in the grey area between programmers' and sysadmin's job.

------
crazygringo
As an America who spent years in Brazil (hence the username), both teaching
English, and programming together with a lot of software developers there
(always speaking in Portuguese), I think this is great.

I never met a developer who had _zero_ English skills. But I also met very,
very few developers who could really converse fluently in English. I realized
how much additional difficulty a lot of them have with coding, because a lot
of them time they can't "just Google it" to find a snippet of code that fixes
their problem, or that documents a known platform bug.

And remember that learning English, while not living in an English-speaking
country, generally takes _years_ of dedicated work -- you're probably either
going to become a good programmer, or good at English, but most people are not
going to have the time for both, that's just reality.

So this is a great move on Stack Overflow's part. Kudos. (Plus, Brazilians are
basically the world's most active social-network users, so there's always
that, too.)

------
rdtsc
Programming specific I think is easier in English.

I speak 3 languages and understand 4. Talking about programming, computer
science and technology in non-Engish is awkward. It either is necessary to
just use English terms anyway for every other noun or struggle with awkward
translation of them.

Things like kernel, doubly linked list, hash table, binary tree, greedy
algorithm, they are all invented in English and when translating them to other
languages, they have a translation but it just sounds very awkward.

So you can have 2 people talking and one uses all translated terminology one
uses the "native" equivalent. And yeah if both happen to speak English they'll
understand what they mean, but if they don't then they might as well speak
different languages. But if they already speak English and it is a public
forum, might as well try to speak English.

Anyway that is just my perspective.

~~~
guelo
I wonder how corporate programmers in non-english speaking countries
communicate about programming. I would imagine that they use their local
language for docs, commit descriptions, email lists, etc.

I think most of the source code people can look at is for open source projects
and they always go with english as the default even when there are mostly non-
english speaking programmers.

But what does it look inside private corporations?

~~~
jaimebuelta
You have a weird jargon of mixed languages... Basically you end up bolting
together english words with other grammar to create monsters...

I try to limit the amount of this weird jargon, but is extremely easy to fall
into that.

PD: This is in Spanish

~~~
NigelTufnel
Personal experience: weird jargon is a good thing. I've read a book on Hadoop
once and it didn't use weird jargon - everything was in my native language. It
was super hard to read - basically I needed to translate the book from my
native language into English in my mind.

------
dmunoz
> Without Googling, name any famous developer from Japan. Or China. Or Russia.

Many Ruby developers won't have a problem with this.

~~~
ScotterC
Yup. Matz immediately came to mind. Also, to the question of english but not
native would be Salvatore of Redis fame.

~~~
angersock
So, not to be mean, but can you name his FQJN (fully-qualified Japanese name)
offhand?

The score of people here saying "Matz" somewhat underscores the issue.

~~~
w1ntermute
And how many people know that DHH is David Heinemeier Hansson? I don't think
the use of a nickname or abbreviation is relevant.

~~~
icelancer
Most, right? I don't write Ruby and I barely know who that is (I could pick
him out of a lineup but that's about it) but I knew that.

------
frade33
Adoption of English language is one of the major reasons, why 3rd world
countries like our, India and Pakistan are thriving in IT. I feel sad for
nations, who are stubborn in their adoption of English language, merely out of
political reasons. Even from a political perspective, this is sad, because you
can't convey your point of view to others.

Oh and by the way, India is 2nd and Pakistan is 3rd largest country by number
of English language Speakers, 1st of course is USA.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-
sp...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-
speaking_population)

Moreover, Do I need to name key Google and Microsoft Employees, who were born
and bred in India too. :)

~~~
maximgsaini
I see English as more of a liability for a country like India. Only 10% of the
Indian elites have any sort of proficiency in English. Indians never developed
an 'infrastructure' around their native language like China did, which results
in a debilitating problem for India. There is a big language barrier in India.
A poor Chinese kid doesn't need to learn a foreign language to be hired as a
full time programmer. But in India, unless you have a working proficiency in
English, say goodbye to any chances of being hired as a programmer. Say
goodbye to any real possibility of using a computer. Say goodbye to the
possibility of understanding any real biochemistry. In India, I can't take a
guy from the streets, give him 2 days of training and ask him to do some work
on a computer. I'll have to spend 2 months with him, teaching him a new
language.

Thus now there are two Indias, the 80-90% non-english speaking India, and the
10-20% english speaking elite India. And the language barrier makes it that
much harder for the under-privileged India to cross over to the other side,
which is not the case in China or Japan.

In 10 years, the kind of language used for human communication will become
irrelevant. Thus, I hope that the Indian problem won't last very long.

~~~
mimighost
>> A poor Chinese kid doesn't need to learn a foreign language to be hired as
a full time programmer

Not really true.

English proficiency is a very important factor in job hunting in China also.
Most of the good programmers I know have certain level of mastery in english,
at least in reading. For sure, China has its own internet ecosystem, the same
applies for the programmer community. But English is still the dominant
language in computer science, a fact that will not be changed in near future.

China has its own english proficiency test, called "四级", literally "Level 4"
or officially CET4 Test. It is required for all college students to pass this
test when graduating, a huge pain for many. And we are not done :a higher
level test, "六级"(Level 6, CET6) awaits for whoever wants to show better than
average english fluency. Which makes thing worse, high score in those tests
doesn't really guarantee real-world good english ability, so additional tests
will be taken by companies themselves to make sure the candidates meet their
requirement.

------
marijn
I, for one, am amazed that this would need justification at all. (And that
half the comments here seem to be saying that devs should 'just learn
English'.)

Languages with many speakers have their own 'world'. Kids, and people without
higher education in such language areas won't have much opportunity to pick up
English. They'll start out without access to English language programming
communities. The only way they'll get anywhere in the field is to have
alternatives in their own language.

------
lucian1900
As a non-native English speaker, I have pretty strong feelings about English
in engineering in general: everyone should just learn English.

I see it as a remarkably good thing that engineering (and to some extent
science) has standardised so much on English and I can only hope that all
other walks of life will as well.

It would be so nice if everyone on earth spoke excellent English.

~~~
speeder
My dad (that is a excellent programmer, and tried very hard for 20 years
already to learn english and failed) disagree with you.

~~~
sabbatic13
And your dad's alternative would be what? To balkanize science and
engineering? To create dozens of separate islands of knowledge? To slow the
spread of knowledge, because everything deemed significant has to be
translated to and from 20 languages to gain general currency?

How is one or even a thousand persons' inability to learn another language an
argument for how science should be practiced?

~~~
dwaltrip
The assumptions, the arrogance, the blame passing, the lack of understanding
of contexts not your own... You are basically impling all non-english speakers
should be so very ashamed that they are holding back broad human progress with
their stupid insistency in continuing to use their native tongue. Which I find
absurd. (Btw, I only speak English).

As technologists, maybe we could find solutions that, ya know, don't force
massive, life altering requirements on billions of people?

~~~
lucian1900
Not ashamed, they may not have had the resources or opportunity to learn
English. But as flawed as the language is, it has won.

It's not hard to speak at least two languages and one of them should be
English.

There is no solution as good as the whole world being bilingual.

------
yeukhon
I am an immigrant from China and I came to the States after finishing sixth
grade so I can still read and write in Chinese. Perfectly excellent. The
advantage of that is I can utilize more resources that are only available in
Chinese. You'd surprise how often Chinese programmers leave useful code
snippets or tips in Chinese. So knowing a foreign language can definitely
help.

While I agree having a non-English version helps growing the community (as
pointed out in the article it could help a young girl to get started), but I
am worrying about fragmentation. Also, SO tends to be pretty strict about the
way a post is written - so a little girl who is making a post will either be
closed or forced to edit. I don't know - it is as if I want people to take the
hard route because it can benefit them in the long run.

I really have a mixed feelings about this too.

Side note:

 _That probably limits the list of potential candidates to Mandarin, Japanese,
Portuguese, Russian..._

Hmmm it's Chinese since people write in Chinese characters. Mandarin is a
dialectic.

~~~
pessimizer
This is odd, but I've noticed that technical Chinese blogs auto-translate
_really_ well. I used to follow erlang-china.org, and rarely had a problem
with understanding.

I have no idea how well it works the other way though, so my comments were all
bare links.

A Chinese friend of mine guessed that it has something to do with how most
Chinese words are built from other Chinese words, and the specificity of
technical terms made the translations really easy and unambiguous. He
explained it better than I just did:)

~~~
yeukhon
Yes the translation is not bad at all, but to search that content in the first
place? You probably want to know how to type Chinese :) and know how to master
search in Chinese.

If you are from HK, people often write with cantonese slang words (it's like
someone writing ya'll instead of you all - that sort of thing). Translation is
not as good as translating formal Chinese writing :) but that's a minor thing.

I can understand 1/3 of the Japanese websites by knowing Kanji. And if you
know English then you have the door to any language share the latin root.

------
ishener
instead of starting a brand new stack overflow in another language they should
think of some way of letting people translate questions & answers and earn
karma for that. this way, like wikipedia, you can always go from one language
to another for the translation

~~~
dm2
That's basically what they are doing.

If someone asks a question on the Portuguese then it would be easy for an
English and Portuguese speaker to search the English site for the answer and
then post to the Portuguese site and earn their karma.

------
goshx
This is AWESOME! I even get emotional about this and here is why.

TL;DR: I am a Brazilian and it would have been much easier for me if I had the
resources I needed available in my mother language.

Long story:

I am a Brazilian. I was born in a small town in Brazil (population: 13k) and I
only had access to public schools. Public schools in Brazil do have English
classes, however all I remember was them teaching the verb "to be" in every
single grade. When I was 15, in 1998, my mom found a way to finance a cheap
computer for me. My first access to a computer. Everything was in English. I
did not have access to internet initially, but the computer came with a few
softwares installed. At the time I also asked my mom to buy me a translation
dictionary, so I could learn English. Translating most of the things I was
seeing on the screen did not make sense at all, so I just assumed them as part
of my vocabulary giving them meanings, but not translations, like "software",
or software names... Later, with access to internet (long distance dial up
after midnight), it was really, REALLY, hard to search for stuff related to
programming because there was almost nothing available in portuguese. I had to
learn how to translate properly what I was looking for before I could even do
the search. Not sure native English speakers understand this part. So what I
tried to do instead was to learn English. I did that by finding lyrics of the
songs I liked online (they were easy to find since no translation was needed)
and translating them with the help from my dictionary. And this is basically
how I learned most of the English that I know. (In fact, I never went to a
real English school/class, as you can probably tell at this point by reading
this). But dude, I was able to do this because I put _A LOT_ of effort and
hours, and nights, doing this, day after day, because I really wanted to
learn. (It paid off... I am a H1B living in Miami today)

Learning English is not for everyone. Learning another language is not for
everyone. Learning how to code IS WAY MUCH FUN than learning how to speak
another language.

While I always tell people to try to learn English, because they're going to
have better chances, I believe this should not be a barrier for the average
people to learn programming. Or anything, really. You have no idea of how many
great developers in Brazil do not speak proficient English.

So, thanks to the guys at Stack Overflow for doing this. I'll make sure I
share this with everyone I know that always wanted to learn programming but
had English as a barrier.

I am confident that the IT industry in Brazil will be thankful for this in the
long term.

Thank you guys.

~~~
zhemao
> I never went to a real English school/class, as you can probably tell at
> this point by reading this

No, I couldn't. You give yourself too little credit. Except for "way much
fun", everything you wrote was perfect idiomatic English.

I actually think a lot of us native English speakers are kind of jealous that
we have little incentive to become proficient in a foreign language since so
much of the worlds information and communication is in English. I know I am.
I'm trying to learn Portuguese right now, just for fun, but I know I will
never be as fluent in it as you are in English.

~~~
goshx
Obrigado :)

~~~
zhemao
De nada

------
BoppreH
Unintended consequence #1: duplicated questions.

[http://pt.stackoverflow.com/questions/4021/numero-de-
vezes-q...](http://pt.stackoverflow.com/questions/4021/numero-de-vezes-que-um-
documento-ja-foi-visualizado-no-amazon-cloudsearch)
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21550842/amazon-
cloudsear...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21550842/amazon-cloudsearch-
show-the-number-of-times-a-document-has-already-been-seen)

Corollary: answer "arbitrage" (translating existing answers for duplicated
questions).

~~~
NSAID
Completely intended, by my read. It wouldn't make any sense if you couldn't
ask a question that was already asked in a language you don't know.

FTA: "we expect almost every question asked on the Portuguese site to also be
asked (and answered) on the English site."

~~~
BoppreH
It was the same user asking the same question, and the English version may or
may not be machine translated.

It feels spammy, specially since the English version isn't up to par. I'm not
sure this is what they had in mind with that quote.

~~~
NSAID
Ah, I missed the identical users. That is an interesting situation, especially
if a user might be fluent in both languages (which may or may not be the case
in this situation).

------
V-2
I see nothing wrong about programmers who want to discuss or exchange
experience etc. in their native language. I'm one of such guys... English is
not my first language, either.

The thing is that the SO format is not suited for extended discussions. Its
power lies and shows in brevity.

Like it or not - good working knowledge of English is a must if you consider
yourself a professional. (In this field, of course; it's very specific).

If your English doesn't allow you to freely elaborate on the caveats of system
architecture, working culture and whatnot, it's perfectly fine in my opinion
and nothing to fret about.

But if you can't ask a brief technical question, or you stumble trying to
answer one, that's a shortcoming that should be addressed. For your own good,
nobody's else

------
davidcollantes
A really bad idea. Now a really good answer or tip that would otherwise be on
the 'regular' stackoverflow (albeit in broken English) will remain, unknown,
on a 'pt.overflow.' That is one drawback. Another drawback, an English only
stackoverflow helps a Portuguese speaking person to learn another language
that is, now, more universal. Yet another, it fractures an otherwise more
unified community.

My mother tongue is Spanish, yet I have no issues with an English only
stackoverflow, at all.

~~~
lmkg
> * Now a really good answer or tip that would otherwise be on the 'regular'
> stackoverflow (albeit in broken English) will remain, unknown*

This assumes that, had the Portuguese site not existed, the question would
have been answered on the English site. There is also the possibility that the
question would not have been answered at all.

~~~
davidcollantes
Sight. Sorry, I really can't explain it well.

Have you ever encountered something, sometimes, that you know doesn't click,
but can't explain why? I really think this is a bad idea, and somehow, a waste
of resources, a repetition of things. But...

It will affect me little if I pretend it doesn't exist and continue using
stackoverflow as I have been until now. Just ignore 'the news' and move on.

------
_random_
I struggle to imagine a developer who is _talented_ (in actual real sense of
this) in programming yet cannot ask/answer a tech question in English (I am
not a native speaker). Has anyone met a person like this?

~~~
dictum
There are many forms and degrees of _talented_ , and many of them are
perfectly possible without being able to write in English comfortably.

~~~
_random_
Ever met?

------
eknkc
They are spreading thin.

It used to be StackOverflow, I'd go search for something and ask if the search
would yield nothing. Now they have a thousand sites and I don't know which one
to look at, or ask questions on.

~~~
unwind
I believe the solution to that is to not aim for a specific site and use its
search; use a regular web search instead and trust that SO and gang make their
sites indexable. That certainly seems to be the case. I have a particular SO
question I often reference in order to link to it in answers and comments; I
always just google two words to find it.

------
Argorak
With a few friends, i've been running a ruby bulletin board in german and
found that there is a definite need for localized assistance.

While quite a few people can read english docs okay, it is far harder to ask
proper questions and interact with people. There is always need for
clarification. Assistance is far easier without a language barrier.

------
Walkman
I have been in Portugal two years ago and everybody, I mean EVERYBODY told me
that all Portuguese people speak English, because every movie comes with
subtitles only (no sound translation), and most of the films are English. They
only translates cartoons for small kids. I mean, is Portuguese the best
language to start with?

~~~
dcustodio
I think the idea of starting with portuguese is because of the large brazilian
community that struggles with english. In portugal most programmers speak
english fluently. I, for one, will continue to use english.

------
moron4hire
This is great, and I think multilingualism is something we should encourage
amongst dedicated developers. I mean, it's not like we don't already have to
learn a variety of languages already.

I personally get a kick out of communicating with people in other languages.
It almost seems like a super power.

~~~
lucb1e
> I think multilingualism is something we should encourage amongst dedicated
> developers.

Why in the world would you do that? Languages are the biggest timesuck in the
history of humanity. How can you build knowledge together if you can't even
communicate with one another beyond drawing a square rectangle in the sand? We
finally got around to doing counting in, well, mostly one universal system,
but languages are still a major PITA for everyone involved.

Sure it may be fun and great for you that you get a kick out of it, but the
existence of different language for the sheer fun of it is about as useful as
forcing entire nations to play violin.

> I mean, it's not like we don't already have to learn a variety of languages
> already.

Uhm, no? I know English and my native language (Dutch) and that is more than
enough. The only language I had to learn besides my own was the one that most
of us on here see as the universal one: English. And for all I care the Dutch
language can die a quick and silent death.

~~~
pacofvf
> Why in the world would you do that? Languages are the biggest timesuck in
> the history of humanity.

A language not only express the ideas of the speaker, it also carries a lot of
historical and cultural data, I love learning new languages even if I don't
become proficient in that language. Being said that, I don't think it's a good
idea for non-native Portuguese speakers to ask/answer questions in pt.so

> Uhm, no? I know English and my native language (Dutch) and that is more than
> enough. The only language I had to learn besides my own was the one that
> most of us on here see as the universal one: English. And for all I care the
> Dutch language can die a quick and silent death.

I'm a native Spanish speaker, being the second language with most native
speakers in the world only behind mandarin, why would I settle just with
English?, Spanish is more useful for me in all other activities of my life, I
only use English on the Internet, even my Brazilian boss is a fluent Spanish
speaker.

~~~
moron4hire
I've never explicitly studied Spanish, but apparently I've been exposed to it
enough in the US that I was able to get through a recent trip to Ecuador
without _too much_ trouble. It was easier to read than to try to speak, as I
could generally figure out the context of sentences based on key words and
shared Latin influences with English. I actually found billboards to be the
hardest to understand, which I guess makes sense. Billboards tend to use
incomplete sentences and made up words to try to get their point across
quickly.

It was just a lot of fun. Several months ago, I started learning Russian. Once
I got over the hurdle of the alphabet (again, I had actually once studied it
in grade school), I realized that I could figure a lot of things out as I
went.

It feels like being Sherlock Holmes or something.

------
berdon
Was anyone else expecting the post to detail their plan to "translate" non-
english Stack Exchange sites to English to continue content centralization?

~~~
lucb1e
Not me at least.

Was I the only one expecting some comment about planning a bot to translate
non-English StackExchange sites to English when glancing over the comment
thread and seeing your comment? (I was!)

------
csense
This originally had the same title as the article, namely, "Can’t We All be
Reasonable and Speak English?"

It's apparently been edited by a mod. But why? HN's title guidelines state:

"If the original title includes the name of the site, please take it out,
because the site name will be displayed after the link anyway...Otherwise
please use the original title..."

I can understand an edit which moves a title in the direction of compliance
with the title guidelines, but in this case, the edit actually increases the
number of title guideline violations by two: It changes the title to be
different from the title of the post, and it also inserts the name of the site
into the title.

What's up with that?

------
rogerthis
Recent research in four universities in Brasilia (federal capital) area has
shown that 50% of students are functional illiterates.

As I said before, we g(b)razilians can't write or understand or own mother
tongue, imagine doing it with English.

------
blah32497
Maybe this is a dumb question, but why not just use Google translate? (or some
equivalent)

If you don't know any English and you were to auto-translate your question. I
think the vast majority of the time you'd get the answer you're looking for.
You don't even need the result to be very grammatically correct or to sound
natural. Most of the time you just need to get the gist of it and get a code
snippet.

It'd be helpful if there was a translation scheme that was targeted towards
the programming field so keywords were translated appropriately (so like,
whatever the Portuguese equivalent of 'namespace' would translate accurately
to 'namespace' etc. etc.). I feel like creating of map of terms would be
relatively easy.

In the grad scheme of things I really really hope knowledge is consolidated in
English. It's the lingua franca of the world, and it's also one of the most
expressive languages. I spend some time working in Japan, and they had so much
knowledge squirreled away from the world b/c they were effectively too lazy to
learn English. (they're large enough, and advanced enough that they can afford
to maintain trade journals and online technical communities in Japanese)

~~~
jaydles
We'd _love_ to be able to take all the info we have, and make it available in
every language. But here's why it's harder than it looks:

`This is probably a dumb question , but why Google Did not translate simply
use ? (Or equivalent ) You do not know English , and if you did, I will
automatically convert to your question . I think most of the time , and want
to get the answer you are looking for. It grammatically correct is very , or
not require a result , you also , to sound natural . Most of the time , you
need to and get the gist of it , to get the code snippet you . (Such as , what
so that you will translate well to etc. ' space ' Portuguese equivalent of '
space ') because it was translated properly , keyword if there is a conversion
method that targets the programming field I think that can help . I feel like
the creation of the map of the term would be relatively easy to me. The
graduate scheme of things , I hope knowledge is connected in English really .
It is a common language in the world , and it also , it 's one of the most
expressive language . I spend some time working in Japan , and the knowledge
of many , they were crowded world away from the B / C was trouble they will
learn English very effectively . ( They are large enough , they're advanced
enough that you can afford to maintain the online technical community and
trade press in Japan )`

I translated your text above to Japanese and back. (To be fair, that's two
"lossy" transfers, not one, but it's pretty clear that you couldn't possibly
have a two way discussion that way.

------
hattenn
(Here's the comment I posted on StackOverflow, I wanted to share it here too.)

I haven't read all the comments, so forgive me if I'm just repeating the same
stuff (on another note, I hope I am).

This is a horrible idea, if you ask me. Language barriers are there because
there are languages. If you keep supporting languages, there will always be
language barriers.

English speakers, especially Americans, feel bad about "making people speak
their language". I have seen this many times. But it's just ridiculous. We
don't need more than one language. Having more than one language:

1) Creates a language barrier, thus slowing down advancement. 2) Gives people
a reason for discrimination, just like nationalism, racism, and religion.

When you say that "If just one little girl in Brazil sticks with programming
because an answer on this site helped her finish her first project, well…
that’s not good enough!", it sounds like a really humble thing to do, but it
in fact is the opposite. You are overlooking the fact that there's a lot of
information regarding programming and many other things in many different
languages already. I'm not a native speaker of English, and I learned English
thanks to my interest in programming. First I started with reading stuff in my
own language, then I realized that I could learn much more if I read stuff in
English. And that's how it should be.

I don't care if it's English or any other language, but we only need one
language, not three, not two, only one. The rest is just noise.

To wrap it up, disguised by a seemingly humble thing, you are supporting
language barriers, by supporting languages. I'd expect better from you guys.

~~~
dcarmo
I totally agree with you. It's not because it's English per se, it's because
we need one universal language. English is the better choice because all the
code that we have to write is based in... English. "while", "for", "if",
"switch", "return", those are all English words that weren't picked at random:
they have actual meaning on what you're doing. If you are programmer and don't
know English, you'll never be a great programmer because you'll never
understand the basics of the programming language you're working with. By the
way, I'm Brazilian. You want to start programming? Great, learn English first.
It's not hard and it's gonna make more good than harm to you.

------
loomio
This is fantastic! Congrats to Stack Overflow and here's to more languages in
the future.

We were shocked and delighted when our international user community had
massive enthusiasm for translating our app into different languages, and now
it's live in Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Greek,
Vietnamese, Bahasa Indonian, Dutch and several other languages, with more like
Telegu, Malayalam, and Japanese in the pipeline. It's opened up whole worlds
of users who otherwise wouldn't have ever had access to the tool.

As some other commenters have noted, there is definitely a social inclusion
aspect to releasing in various languages - not everyone has the same access to
education around the world. Furthermore, we'll have a much richer community
and society if we open communication to everyone and don't expect everyone to
learn English, which is a more or less arbitrary standard. We've also recently
released a feature where you can translate comments in the app instantly,
meaning people who speak different languages can communicate in the same
conversation! It's so cool to see.

We've had a great time using Transifex and I can recommend it to any software
project hoping to support a translation community. For us as an open source
project, we have been very grateful that all our translation has been done by
volunteers, and Transifex makes it really easy to coordinate with them. If any
other projects are interested in how we manage translation on a technical
level, we wrote a blog post about it [0] and will be publishing another, more
in-depth one, shortly.

[0] [http://blog.loomio.org/2013/10/01/translating-
loomio-2/](http://blog.loomio.org/2013/10/01/translating-loomio-2/)

------
x0054
Most Russian programmers I know speak enough English to get by in most
situations. I can't speak for other countries though.

------
fauria
> Without Googling, name any famous developer from Japan. Or China. Or Russia.

Yukihiro Matsumoto. Rasmus Lerdorf. Guido van Rossum.

~~~
pcrh
Would Satoshi count? (I'm not even a programmer!)

~~~
lmm
The most plausible candidate I heard is actually called Mike.

------
V-2
There's a Polish clone of StackOverflow:
[http://devpytania.pl/](http://devpytania.pl/)

The reasoning behind it was more or less the same. It's not very active though
and a good number of questions wouldn't meet SO standards (subjective ones,
"list" questions etc.)

------
AndyKelley
So why start a duplicate place for knowledge? Seems much simpler to integrate
a translation system into the canonical English database. Existing entries can
be translated into other languages and then improved upon. Hell, you could
automate the entire first step and then crowd source the improvements.

~~~
mhp
If the only goal was to present what exists in other languages, this would be
a great idea. Your suggestion results in translations for all the people
searching for content in a language other than English. But it doesn't allow
those people to participate in return. You need the community of PT speakers
to succeed (which is the whole reason we have separate sites for different
topics, and the reason why we believe our model is better for expert answers
than Yahoo Answers, Quora, et al).

------
dsr_
When I tell someone I work at Stack Exchange, my absolute favorite response
is:

    
    
        “I basically learned to code from posts I found on Stack Overflow”
    

\---

While I've never had anyone tell me that, I don't think I'd be happy to hear
that in an interview.

~~~
cbaleanu
Because knowing not to write a bubble sort or fizz buzz implementation in
Modula-2 without googling for some language reference makes you so much
better.

SO is a part of a developers every-day life, like it or not. This is not the
90s anymore, we have knowledge at our fingertips, we should access it and
deliver that product or whatever is we're working on faster, without getting
stuck in stuff that can be solved with one google search.

edit: spelling

~~~
TillE
Stack Overflow is great for reference or solving specific problems. It's
pretty awful for learning anything in depth.

------
jowiar
It would be pretty sweet if they have some process of linking duplicate
questions between the two, or if bilingual folks could ask questions in
multiple languages. Translating questions and/or answers could be as valuable
as answering questions.

------
aquadrop
Their explanation would be good in static world - we give non-english speakers
opportunity to be a part of global SO. But I'm afraid that in the future it
will hurt main SO, since core community of each language will move to its own
*.SO, leaving english section for native-only speakers. Of course, maybe that
won't be the case and I hope they will watch for negative effects. English
language as an intermediate for all programmers is a bliss. Imagine how it
would be nice if all people had one language and there were no communication
barriers (damn Babylonians :) It's not possible in common case, but with
programming we almost have it.

------
tsm
This is one of the few situations where I side strongly with ESR:
[http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-
howto.html#skills4](http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#skills4)

~~~
raganwald
Even if he happened to be right about his contention, this isn't the point at
all. The question here is, "Should a programming service be offered in a
language other than English?" Whereas ESR is claiming, "Programmers should
learn to write English proficiently."

Imagine, if you will, that Silicon Valley is THE place to live if you want to
be a programmer. Alice has job advice: "Move to Silicon Valley."

Now imagine that Bob wishes to open a hackerspace code+cafe in New York.
Should we really tell him that this is a bad idea? Is it somehow a terrible
idea to help programmers who chose to ignore Alice's advice to be productive?
Is it somehow undermining TheGrandPlan™ to support a programmer in New York
City?

Are we "fragmenting the hacker community" by opening a cafe in NYC?

I can't think of any good reasons not to make Stack Overflow available in
Portuguese. And any or every other language. An argument to keep SO English-
only might as well be accompanied by an argument that there should be no
conference talks in any language except English, no programming books in any
language except English, and no help or online documentation in any language
except English.

------
kriro
I think this is a very good idea. The point about being interested in
programming way before you ever considered learning English is the selling
point for me. Portuguese seems like a good starting language as well, well
done (I'd like to see German added to the list though).

As long as it doesn't lead to more native language (from people that actually
speak English) code I'm 100% on board. I come across code in German and French
somewhat regularly and...yikes (unfortunately I know of quite a few
universities that actually teach programming with native language class and
method names and the like)

------
6cxs2hd6
> 10% of the world’s programmers are in China

> 1.4% of our visits come from China

> Only 4.8% of our visits come from China, Japan and Korea combined

> So, if the data tell us that we’re getting roughly 80% less activity from
> Asia than we should in the absence of language constraints, why does it feel
> so obvious that all serious programmers speak English?

That data says it's less. It doesn't say the reason why is language
constraints.

p.s. With or without this data, sure, it's obviously false that "all serious
programmers speak English", and obviously true that _some_ more people will
participate using their native language.

~~~
analyst74
When I first started, I used to hang out and ask questions in one of the major
Chinese programmer forums.

I knew some English back then, but looking at a wall of English text was
daunting in itself, now imagine a wall of English text that is not easy to
understand even for native English speakers.

~~~
6cxs2hd6
Oh I'm totally sympathetic and think it's great to have it in more languages.

I just didn't understand their logic. They seemed to say, the only thing
holding back those 80% is the language barrier, and once we break it, the
numbers will shoot up. Well maybe. But it reminds me of circa 1999 market
math: "If get just 1% of the Chinese market..." says someone, followed by
investors taking a haircut as a result of lame business plan.

------
angersock
Here's one:

Because any language other than English is brainfucked in string support.

There, I said it.

~~~
_random_
No, let's use other languages for naming stuff in programming languages that
support Unicode sources!

------
mathattack
I like it. I wish there was a reference to Orkut worked in there. That social
network thrived for a long time purely because a couple Brazilian open source
celebs latched on to it.

------
smackfu
Odd that they waited two weeks to write this blog post. Should have been out
on day 1, because obviously people are going to have questions about it.
Instead they just had an explanation blog post in Portuguese:

[http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/ola-mundo-
announcing-s...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/ola-mundo-announcing-
stack-overflow-in-portuguese/)

------
oofabz
I think it's great to see North American developers reach out to their South
American brethren. We spend so much time thinking about Europe and Asia that
we often forget about our next door neighbors.

South America may not have such a high GDP, but they are also a lot more
receptive to partnership. Europe and Asia mostly want to be left alone to do
their own thing.

------
JohnnyBrown
> we’re getting roughly 80% less activity from Asia than we should in the
> absence of language constraints

Bit of an assumption here: absent language constraints, Chinese and anglophone
developers would use Stackoverflow at the same rate. I'd say it's pretty
likely that China has a popular programming QA site of its own.

------
whizzkid
Solution to this idea should be reconsidered in my opinion.

Instead of creating pure language specific sites, smarter approach can be more
helpful to everyone in the community. Let's give it a try;

    
    
      'Argument is not numeric (ArgumentError)'
    

What is there to write/ask differently about it in English or Portuguese? If a
subsystem to stackoverflow is created for each language, you might be able to
see the answers written by other native speakers. An accepted answer will
always be in English but for the ones that can not understand what is going
on, they can click on their preferred language button and see the explanation
in Portuguese.

This would also give better overview of which country actually has more
involved to specific topic and so on.

To keep in short, every question asked in stackoverflow has a localization
button to see answers from different languages. If someone is not comfortable
writing the answer in English then they can write it in Russian. Then, when an
American checks the question in english with no answers, he/she can try to
translate the answers from other languages. Which is a win/win for both
parties

------
magicroundabout
"That probably limits the list of potential candidates to Mandarin, Japanese,
Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, and Spanish. "

Apropos of nothing but the sheer size of the language community, I am quite
surprised that Arabic doesn't feature in this list.

------
RomanPushkin
This post will not be complete without mentioning Claude Piron
[http://dotsub.com/view/54b18453-7176-44ef-b686-952b239975f9](http://dotsub.com/view/54b18453-7176-44ef-b686-952b239975f9)

------
pjmlp
As Portuguese I congratulate SO. Now I just hope it means all Portuguese
variants (Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, East Timor,
Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe) and not just Brazil.

~~~
marcosdumay
Written Portuguese has very little variance now. That's what last year
orthographic change was all about. Most of the difference are on names, and on
IT we use a completely different lingo anyway.

~~~
pjmlp
Yes, now imagine a discussion thread on SO using multiple speakers from all
Portuguese speaking countries.

------
diogene
Is it going to be Portuguese from Portugal or Brazil?

~~~
pjmlp
I imagine this is a rhetoric question.

~~~
diogene
How is it rethoric? Portuguese is a language that mutated a lot between the
countries that use it. For more informations check
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Language_Orthographi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Language_Orthographic_Agreement_of_1990)

~~~
pjmlp
Because if you bothered to read the article you would have seen it is
Brazilian Portuguese, assuming you are Portuguese native speaker like myself.

------
devgutt
I think this is not the correct way to tackle the problem. Build a website in
Portuguese will only divide instead of stimulate the participation of users
which doesn't have English as native.

I'd like to propose a different approach:

For the users that speak Portuguese natively, make the questions, answers and
comments all written in Portuguese FIRST, and, a English version MANDATORY
afterwards (which would be the standard language).

The Portuguese-spoken users would see all this items also in Portuguese, and
the remains in English.

The same for users of other languages. For those who speak only English, it
would be no difference.

This approach has several advantages:

* It makes the user __think __in their native language, giving much better answers.

* The user is forced to make a second review in the answer when it was translated to English.

* The user will identify their language peers easily.

* The user will be more comfortable to participate, because the barrier to write in English is tremendous (much bigger than a lot of people think).

This way, I think you are able to keep a single website for ALL developers,
stimulating participation.

======================================================================

Same comment in Portuguese (my native language, just for illustration)

======================================================================

Acho que isso não é uma forma adequada de tratar o problema. Criar um site em
português irá dividir ao invés de estimular a participação destes usuários que
não tem inglês nativo.

Gostaria de propôr uma solução, que no meu ponto-de-vista, seria bem melhor:

Para os usuários que falam Português nativamente, façam que todas as
perguntas, respostas e comentários no site sejam escritos em Português,
primeiramente, e adicionada, OBRIGATORIAMENTE, uma versão em inglês (que seria
a língua comum).

Os usuários que falam Português nativo veriam automaticamente estes itens
também em português, e o restante em inglês.

O mesmo para usuários de outras línguas. Para aqueles que falam apenas inglês,
não teria nenhuma diferença.

Essa abordagem tem várias vantagens:

* Estimular que o usuário __pense __em sua língua nativa, fornecendo respostas muito mais precisas.

* Força o usuário fazer uma segunda revisão na resposta quando for traduzir para o inglês.

* O usuário nativo vai identificar os seus pares rapidamente.

* O usuário vai ficar mais confortável em participar, pois a barreira de escrever em inglês é enorme (maior do que muitos pensam)

Acho que desta forma poderia fazer um único site para TODOS os
desenvolvedores, estimulando a participação.

~~~
blahedo
This is an interesting idea, but I wonder about the practicality. When you say
something is MANDATORY, whose responsibility is it? The question writer, who
may not have English at all? Someone else? Who?

~~~
devgutt
The question writer. The user still has to have some ability to understand the
standard language of the site.

------
anovikov
Very poor idea, if you're a coder you've got to speak decent English. There is
no way to get around that, period.

------
gesman
printf ("Olá, mundo!");

------
tucif
is there is any major open source project that is being developed by
Portuguese-speaking people only? i.e. mailing list, bug tracker and comments
all in Portuguese.

------
DyslexicAtheist
Nein!

------
notastartup
I am afraid that stackoverflow has become a very hostile environment for the
sake of some delusive over optimization as a code bank for every single
question out there. The thing about questions is that although there are
similarities, they often are not placed in the same context, stackoverflow
mods zealously flag even relevant questions like "what libraries should I use
for X" because it's not a really answerable question but they are forgetting
that this optimization by downvoting (negative user experience) and censuring
the question asker leaves a very bad taste in new comers experience.

Even I, as an old timer on stackoverflow get harassed (the usual passive
aggressive and cold hearted engineer style) with time to time by people who
otherwise do not have any reason to be commenting on the question itself such
as "if OP doesn't know this, it's a miracle that he does X" or other ad
hominem remarks.

Stackoverflow really has become a hostile place to ask questions provided they
don't censure you for variety of subjective rules.

These days I find Ask HN to be far better user experience.

