Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese

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.

>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.

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.

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