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Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese

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Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese

#71

Post by jacalata »

venomsnake wrote: post #26

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…

(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.

Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese

#72

Post by noname123 »

kroger wrote: post #57

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 w…

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?

Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese

#73

Post by sentenza »

phowat wrote: post #39

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

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).

Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese

#74

Post by sentenza »

phowat wrote: post #66
Kronopath wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese

#75

Post by icebraining »

jacalata wrote: post #70
icebraining wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" :|

Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese

#76

Post by walshemj »

stingraycharles wrote: post #53
phowat wrote: post #39

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

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.

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 :-)

Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese

#77

Post by ufo »

icebraining wrote: post #46
ufo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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)

Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese

#78

Post by ufo »

reubenmorais wrote: post #42
bnegreve wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

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 :)

Re: Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese

#80

Post by ionforce »

friendzis wrote: post #45
rglullis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 quit…

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

How is this a removal of content?
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