Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese(blog.stackoverflow.com)
blog.stackoverflow.com
Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/ola-mundo-announcing-stack-overflow-in-portuguese/
95 comments
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.
> >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.
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.
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.
I can accept English as a professional requirement [1], but it's actually pretty easy to get into programming as a non-"professional programmer", and we're often pushing that programming should be extended out to school children or other groups that we can't also count on pouring years into an English-as-second-language education. I'd like such people to be able to find materials in their own language if possible, lest the bar get raised too high for basically no good reason.
[1]: Cards on table, I am effectively monolingual (can read simple French, can arguably read English far enough back in time that's it's not really the same language anymore, but that's not practically useful for programming), but IMHO that's mostly because I just have no options here for being immersed in another language, or I'd pick one up. I've taken a stab a couple of times at learning other languages but with zero (natural) opportunity to speak it to anybody else it's been an uphill battle to convince my brain it's worth doing; it keeps optimizing away the second language and, abstractly, it's correct, and that's hard to argue with....
[1]: Cards on table, I am effectively monolingual (can read simple French, can arguably read English far enough back in time that's it's not really the same language anymore, but that's not practically useful for programming), but IMHO that's mostly because I just have no options here for being immersed in another language, or I'd pick one up. I've taken a stab a couple of times at learning other languages but with zero (natural) opportunity to speak it to anybody else it's been an uphill battle to convince my brain it's worth doing; it keeps optimizing away the second language and, abstractly, it's correct, and that's hard to argue with....
Fragmenting has always been a concern, but eventually, we realized that there are LOTS of good developers who are much less likely to participate (type) on a site in a language other than their primary one.
(Japan is a great example of a place where there are very few devs who even want to consume programming information in English, let alone exchange it that way.)
As a native English speaker, I imagine myself at a professional meetup or cocktail party where everyone else is speaking French (which I studied in college). How many jokes would I tell? How many would I even understand?. The point is, I can function, and understand all the words, but I can't really feel like a fully-integrated part of the group, and the whole thing is hard work. Can I get mission critical information? Yeah. Do I want to hang out there and try to help others? No - even though I may have mastered the topic, the language gap makes me feel less excited and less qualified than I would in an all-english group.
(Japan is a great example of a place where there are very few devs who even want to consume programming information in English, let alone exchange it that way.)
As a native English speaker, I imagine myself at a professional meetup or cocktail party where everyone else is speaking French (which I studied in college). How many jokes would I tell? How many would I even understand?. The point is, I can function, and understand all the words, but I can't really feel like a fully-integrated part of the group, and the whole thing is hard work. Can I get mission critical information? Yeah. Do I want to hang out there and try to help others? No - even though I may have mastered the topic, the language gap makes me feel less excited and less qualified than I would in an all-english group.
> 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.
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.
I prefer the English wikipedia to my native one. Also wikipedia is not SO. A good answer in English helps the whole world. A perfect in Portuguese helps only Brazil and Portugal. There should be harmonizing effort that at least takes the cream of pt.* and moves it to the main site. And I think there is a fundamental problem with SO and the way they manage the content generated - the current model is not working well for me lately.
> I prefer the English wikipedia to my native one.
Yes, but obviously, you can read English. Most people can't.
> A good answer in English helps the whole [programming] world.
There is only about 1/10th of the population that speak English as first or second language[1]. I am sure that there are plenty of people that could use a good Q/A website where they can ask questions in their mother tong.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_numb...
Yes, but obviously, you can read English. Most people can't.
> A good answer in English helps the whole [programming] world.
There is only about 1/10th of the population that speak English as first or second language[1]. I am sure that there are plenty of people that could use a good Q/A website where they can ask questions in their mother tong.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_numb...
> 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.
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.
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 :)
The English SO was a special place, since many of the users came from Joel's and Jeff's blogs, instead of Google, so I don't think they can be compared directly.
(disclaimer - English is my second language, so I suppose I don't have some superiority complex).
but you could have a kind of hazing reaction - people tend to believe that if they have done something and it was hard/unpleasant then it must have been worth doing and other people should have to do it as well.
but you could have a kind of hazing reaction - people tend to believe that if they have done something and it was hard/unpleasant then it must have been worth doing and other people should have to do it as well.
Yes fortunately or unfortunately (depending on how you look at it) English is the defacto language for IT/Engineering - just as pre ww2 for some fields German was a mandatory language and before that all natural philosophers of course used Latin.
English is not, anything is better than having a knowledge and discussion spread over an hodge-podge of languages. And I say this has a non-native English speaker.
You think English is not the defacto language? Why not?
Sorry, I meant "English or not" :|
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
ps: English is not my first language
While it's true that learning English is very important and helpful for non-English-speaking programmers, they address this concern (as it applies to pt.SO) directly in the article. Translated for those who can't read:
We didn't think that having the site one language only would be a problem. After all, most programmers speak English, right? Even programming languages themselves are in English, isn't that right? But we forgot something very important:
We weren't writing a technical manual. We were building a community.
It took a while, but we finally understood what most of you already knew. It's very difficult to be part of a community that, literally, doesn't speak your language.
The point they're trying to make here is that it's one thing to read technical documentation in your non-native language, but it's quite another to try and constructively participate in a community, where there's a lot of complex, back-and-forth discussions, and things need to be explained clearly.
It's true that, for an individual developer, learning English well will open up these sorts of communities. But so long as people aren't yet doing that, communities like pt.SO will be a big help.
We didn't think that having the site one language only would be a problem. After all, most programmers speak English, right? Even programming languages themselves are in English, isn't that right? But we forgot something very important:
We weren't writing a technical manual. We were building a community.
It took a while, but we finally understood what most of you already knew. It's very difficult to be part of a community that, literally, doesn't speak your language.
The point they're trying to make here is that it's one thing to read technical documentation in your non-native language, but it's quite another to try and constructively participate in a community, where there's a lot of complex, back-and-forth discussions, and things need to be explained clearly.
It's true that, for an individual developer, learning English well will open up these sorts of communities. But so long as people aren't yet doing that, communities like pt.SO will be a big help.
Did you guys consider doing something like Simple English Wikipedia instead of a different language? From my experience ( I know, I know, anecdotal evidence) with non-native english speakers using english they seem to be most worried about making mistakes, if they are talking to someone who is also not a native speaker they tend to communicate better simply due to worrying less.
Simple English does not work for non-native speakers and here is why:
Everybody is exposed to some English, but not all people are exposed to the same English. Every non-native speaker is using available media to learn the language, so you'll have people who know bad newspaper English, then people fluent in TV-Drama English and finally those speaking and writing "Broken English" (looking at you, facebook, 4chan, etc.).
So people will be _using_ non-intersecting vocabularies in their own contributions. They would actually have to learn Simple English as another skill first.
Everybody is exposed to some English, but not all people are exposed to the same English. Every non-native speaker is using available media to learn the language, so you'll have people who know bad newspaper English, then people fluent in TV-Drama English and finally those speaking and writing "Broken English" (looking at you, facebook, 4chan, etc.).
So people will be _using_ non-intersecting vocabularies in their own contributions. They would actually have to learn Simple English as another skill first.
For me personally, this has become less of an issue in the last few years. I can't remember the last time I was unable to extract the meaning from a text fragent of interest. If you know a handful languages and substitute the rest with those ubiquitous translation services, there is little that remains inaccessible.
I'm still hoping for a babelfish universe in which a combination of technology and our own mental meaning recognition facilities makes languages a non-issue.
Of course, at this point your mileage may vary. I'd probably not be writing this if 90% of the text I encountered was Chinese, since I have to rely 100% on translation tools to read that. But we're getting there (hopefully).
I'm still hoping for a babelfish universe in which a combination of technology and our own mental meaning recognition facilities makes languages a non-issue.
Of course, at this point your mileage may vary. I'd probably not be writing this if 90% of the text I encountered was Chinese, since I have to rely 100% on translation tools to read that. But we're getting there (hopefully).
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.
I once inherited an spaghetti PHP project with everything (code, comments and documentation) written in swedish. It was awful.
Well at one place we had a mix of Portuguese, English and Polish in out comments.
And much longer ago I had to work on a PET BASIC program for a RnD project for BS 5750 (aka ISO 9000) all of the comments where in Gaelic :-)
And much longer ago I had to work on a PET BASIC program for a RnD project for BS 5750 (aka ISO 9000) all of the comments where in Gaelic :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Quantcast shows ~200K uniques from Portugal, which seems much closer to reality.
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).
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).
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?
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?
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"
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...
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...
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.
That's probably another point.. It's not on our education system, Most mid-class kids go to paid schools, I went to a good one but didn't learn English there, I did a paid, years long, English course and played a lot of MMOs so it was 'easy', I believe in India and other outsourcing hotspots English is much more tied in basic education...
The cost for this is really high and now I see that most of my friends who didn't learn from an early age are probably not learning it anymore(time and money issues) and, if they do, their English will still not be very good
The cost for this is really high and now I see that most of my friends who didn't learn from an early age are probably not learning it anymore(time and money issues) and, if they do, their English will still not be very good
Still it's nice that Portuguese got the first one ;) Not to mention the moderation capabilities SO may up the level of things a bit... I'm in some brasilian Android, Ruby and Java lists/groups and it's just noise on my inboxes to me.. Too much of beginner level discussions / Googleable stuff(to me)
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)
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)
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?
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
This is appalling, but sometimes in my work I can better express myself in English than in my mother tongue. It's not because there is much more material in English, but because there is so much high quality material in English.
With this we are basically encouraging removal of high quality material from the web.
Remeber: the internets are english and there are no girls on the internet :D
LOL as a Brazilian, that was my first thought too! The most skilled developers will continue to use the global SO and only the "pesky" will move to the new site. The only real drawback is for the youth who doesn't speak english well yet, and now has one more incentive to never really learn it.
Exactly what I thought as well, [as a Brazilian myself] I predict this PT-SO will be filled with "easy" questions easily answered by a search, and should have a very low level of actual good content. I'm not pulling this out of nowhere, I tried participating in multiple Brazilian programming communities, but it's always the same beginner-level-you-could-have-figured-it-out-yourself type of questions.
As for the youth that doesn't speak English well yet, I suppose they could see the low quality that this PT-SO would be as an incentive to actually start learning it :-)
As for the youth that doesn't speak English well yet, I suppose they could see the low quality that this PT-SO would be as an incentive to actually start learning it :-)
Prediction fulfilled so far.
Wait, I don't think they explicitly chose Portuguese. My understanding is that it was proposed [0] by the community and things worked from there (ie. this announcement is only about SO admins making it official and moving the site out of beta).
[0] https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23539/stack-overf...
[0] https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23539/stack-overf...
Por que começar com português?
Queríamos começar com uma comunidade que atendesse a dois requisitos:
Um grande número de desenvolvedores talentosos, em que Grande parte deles se sentisse muito mais confortável em falar sua própria língua do que o inglês
Why start with portugese?
We wanted to begin with a community that fulfilled two requisites:
Having a large number of talented developers and many of them feeling much more comfortable speaking their own language than English.
It seems to me this is a move to catch Brazilian developers, a wise move I'd say.
Um grande número de desenvolvedores talentosos, em que Grande parte deles se sentisse muito mais confortável em falar sua própria língua do que o inglês
Why start with portugese?
We wanted to begin with a community that fulfilled two requisites:
Having a large number of talented developers and many of them feeling much more comfortable speaking their own language than English.
It seems to me this is a move to catch Brazilian developers, a wise move I'd say.
Good point: Mandarin is clearly more spoken, and further from English, than Portuguese.
About Hindi: keep in mind that English is still an official Indian language, especially since the English Language Amendment Bill.
About Arabic: there are several kinds of Arabic, and not all are mutually intelligible. As a result, the number of people speaking it is a controversial figure... you can then compare the 200 million of native Portuguese speakers with the 280 million of native Modern Standard Arabic speakers.
About Hindi: keep in mind that English is still an official Indian language, especially since the English Language Amendment Bill.
About Arabic: there are several kinds of Arabic, and not all are mutually intelligible. As a result, the number of people speaking it is a controversial figure... you can then compare the 200 million of native Portuguese speakers with the 280 million of native Modern Standard Arabic speakers.
>Por que começar com português?
>[Nota do tradutor: Porque português é a melhor língua, o Brasil é o melhor país e o Jay não consegue ler o que a gente escreve ;)]
>Queríamos começar com uma comunidade que atendesse a dois requisitos:
>Um grande número de desenvolvedores talentosos, em que Grande parte deles se sentisse muito mais confortável em falar sua própria língua do que o inglês
>Então a escolha foi muito simples. O Brasil conta com uma das maiores e mais fortes comunidades de programação do mundo, e isso sem contar Portugal, Moçambique, Angola e outros países menores que acrescentam ainda mais desenvolvedores talentos a esse grupo.
Why start with portuguese?
We wanted to start a community that met two goals:
A big number of talented developers that did feel much more confortable to speak in its own native language than in english.
Then the choise was pretty simple. Brazil have one of the stronger and vibrant programmer communities in the world, and lets not forget about Portugal, Moçambique(how is this spelled in english?) and Angola that adds even more to the talented pool of developers in this group
>[Nota do tradutor: Porque português é a melhor língua, o Brasil é o melhor país e o Jay não consegue ler o que a gente escreve ;)]
>Queríamos começar com uma comunidade que atendesse a dois requisitos:
>Um grande número de desenvolvedores talentosos, em que Grande parte deles se sentisse muito mais confortável em falar sua própria língua do que o inglês
>Então a escolha foi muito simples. O Brasil conta com uma das maiores e mais fortes comunidades de programação do mundo, e isso sem contar Portugal, Moçambique, Angola e outros países menores que acrescentam ainda mais desenvolvedores talentos a esse grupo.
Why start with portuguese?
We wanted to start a community that met two goals:
A big number of talented developers that did feel much more confortable to speak in its own native language than in english.
Then the choise was pretty simple. Brazil have one of the stronger and vibrant programmer communities in the world, and lets not forget about Portugal, Moçambique(how is this spelled in english?) and Angola that adds even more to the talented pool of developers in this group
Let me also add that this is a cultural thing:
I dont know if its because the country is so big.. but culturally people dont care enough for english.. its something everybody wants to know about, of course .. but only the kids of the rich people that can pay for extensive english private class in expensive courses can handle it.. also they create couses with years (2 to 4) long courses.. so they end to be very expensive.. so its something that get in the end of the list of needs..
For instance, i am lucky, cause i learned it from movies when i was teenager, with subtitles on it.. it just happen naturally.. and also.. i needed to go further, as i work with technology.. and yeah.. the good things are in english.. so reading just completed the understanding of it..
but i see a ton of people here(in Brazil), (VERY GOOD hackers) that wont touch this world, because its in english.. Brazillian communitites always have a life on its own.. with its own culture.. like a little bubble .. (remember the Orkut phenomenon?)
Thats why Brazil is such a good opportunity for underdogs.. it doesnt follow too much the political fashion/tendency of the world.. Brazil has a move on its own.. you need to be here enough time to feel it.. and its vibrant..alive..
But its also not isolated.. its has much more in common with US than most of the people think.. with a destiny on its own
I dont know if its because the country is so big.. but culturally people dont care enough for english.. its something everybody wants to know about, of course .. but only the kids of the rich people that can pay for extensive english private class in expensive courses can handle it.. also they create couses with years (2 to 4) long courses.. so they end to be very expensive.. so its something that get in the end of the list of needs..
For instance, i am lucky, cause i learned it from movies when i was teenager, with subtitles on it.. it just happen naturally.. and also.. i needed to go further, as i work with technology.. and yeah.. the good things are in english.. so reading just completed the understanding of it..
but i see a ton of people here(in Brazil), (VERY GOOD hackers) that wont touch this world, because its in english.. Brazillian communitites always have a life on its own.. with its own culture.. like a little bubble .. (remember the Orkut phenomenon?)
Thats why Brazil is such a good opportunity for underdogs.. it doesnt follow too much the political fashion/tendency of the world.. Brazil has a move on its own.. you need to be here enough time to feel it.. and its vibrant..alive..
But its also not isolated.. its has much more in common with US than most of the people think.. with a destiny on its own
> also they create couses with years (2 to 4) long courses
This seems to be a newer trend. The courses used to be much longer than that, to the order of 8 to 10 years.
Yeah, you read that right. Unless you took shortcuts (I had placement tests every once a while which let me skip several years), you'd spend a decade 'learning' English.
They were either creating the curriculum for the lowest common denominator, or the courses were a scam.
My brother skipped all the nonsense and learned enough English to have meaning conversations at age 8, playing Ultima Online. Then a couple of semesters after that helped with the vocabulary and pronunciation.
That, and movies, and setting the operating system to English, after some nagging on my part.
This seems to be a newer trend. The courses used to be much longer than that, to the order of 8 to 10 years.
Yeah, you read that right. Unless you took shortcuts (I had placement tests every once a while which let me skip several years), you'd spend a decade 'learning' English.
They were either creating the curriculum for the lowest common denominator, or the courses were a scam.
My brother skipped all the nonsense and learned enough English to have meaning conversations at age 8, playing Ultima Online. Then a couple of semesters after that helped with the vocabulary and pronunciation.
That, and movies, and setting the operating system to English, after some nagging on my part.
Here's a Google Translate link: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&pre...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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
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?
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?
This is interesting, although most of my colleagues won't google problems in Portuguese.
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.
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.
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.
As stated on the announcement:
Grande parte deles se sentisse muito mais confortável em falar sua própria língua do que o inglês
Most of them feel more comfortable speaking own language than english
Although english is a must be for a developer, there's a lot of people who can't even read.
Grande parte deles se sentisse muito mais confortável em falar sua própria língua do que o inglês
Most of them feel more comfortable speaking own language than english
Although english is a must be for a developer, there's a lot of people who can't even read.
I know, I know... Some people will obviously have a lot of points in StackoverflowPT by translating english answers.
Great! Now do Japanese!
(Or pull a reverse-Cookpad and professionally translate the best answers.)
(Or pull a reverse-Cookpad and professionally translate the best answers.)
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.
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.
I really agree with your second point... however probably having a second subdomain would help with SEO (how they probably get most of their visitors) instead of having popular questions translated into multiple languages.
I really fear if they have a bunch of subdomains and my question is answered in another language that it'll be a PITA to translate.. but I guess that's how non-english speakers feel too.
I really fear if they have a bunch of subdomains and my question is answered in another language that it'll be a PITA to translate.. but I guess that's how non-english speakers feel too.
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.
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.
That let us drop the political implications, and also use an 'engineered language', with an easier learning curve.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
I have a feeling this is more about Google results getting worse really fast when you don't have a lot of relevant content. For example, I don't remember the last time I clicked or even saw those fake generated pages on English Google, yet every time I search for something in Portuguese those show up.
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.
But I understand the initiative. If brazilians can't write in portuguese, imagine their english.
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.
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.
> , 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
How does one search for unsanitized input on GitHub?
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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.
So, yeah, there's a lot of potential for this.
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.
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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).
According to [1] and [2] Russian is still behind some other languages, i.e. Hindi, German and French. Seems that number of visitors is just one of the signals taken into account and not the main one.
[1] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stackoverflow.com
[2] https://www.quantcast.com/stackoverflow.com
[1] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stackoverflow.com
[2] https://www.quantcast.com/stackoverflow.com
Please forgive me, I just have to.
BR? BR? BR? gibe moni plos.
BR? BR? BR? gibe moni plos.
muito bom!
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.
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.
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>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.