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Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

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101–110 of 260 posts

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#102
post #29

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

This is a GREAT idea, one of the best features of wikipedia for the multilingual-ed is you can see the same topic in a different language with single mouse click.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#103
post #46

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…

A point of clarification: the new site has intentionally relaxed rules. SO is a mature site that can afford to have stricter criteria, but pt.so is still in its infancy and the protocol is growing to meet the needs of the community that forms there.

> the new site has intentionally relaxed rules

That sounds like the complete doom of stackexchange, or that site at the very least. Eternal February.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#104
post #85

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.

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

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?

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#105
post #46

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…

> 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.

Questions are only closed if nobody can understand them, not because of grammar. So this little girl wouldn't have gotten her question answered regardless of whether the question was closed, simply because it wasn't clear.

If grammar is lacking but it's understandable, people will either leave it be or edit it to upgrade the English. At least, that is my experience on the IT Security StackExchange site (the only one I'm really active at).

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#106
post #73

"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…

Why not use http://ell.stackexchange.com/ or http://english.stackexchange.com/ to learn English and maintain the stackoverflow one version?

I agree with "soneca", I am from Brazil too and I'm not so confortable to answer in English, but this never stopped me to ask, to answer or whatever... I mean, the real insight is continous learning, we cannot be in the comfort zone. Distribute and divide will result in duplicate QA, duplicated knowledge and maybe feel a little "it is better to us, not mixing in with these people"

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#107

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.

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

As another non-native: ditto. Free English courses for Portuguese-speaking people would be more beneficial I think. (Why free? Well the Portuguese site is free too.)

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#108
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.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#109
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.)

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#110
post #2

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

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!)

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