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Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

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Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#201

Post by est »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #187
zhte415 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> edit: I noticed I just wrote "de" instead of "the". Stupidest mistake I often make. I've worked with a lot of developers from China, who themselves work with developers in India. On a conference call the China sysadmin announces they've verified the C Jia Jia environment and the India developer totally knows what they mean. C++ in Mandarin is pronounced C Jia Jia. Don't sweat it.

Weird, I work in China and have never heard C++ referred to as C加加. Many of my coworkers feel uncomfortable using English sometimes, but I never have a problem understanding them. The Indians speak English at work (in India at least) out of habit.

> Weird, I work in China and have never heard C++ referred to as C加加.

We actually call C++ C艹, and call C# C井

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#202

Post by azernik »

astrodust wrote: post #33
te_platt wrote: post #7

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 Eng…

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 recogni…

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.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#203

Post by lunchbox »

gbog wrote: post #198
zanny wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sof…

> 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, vocalisati…

> 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).

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#204

Post by fremn »

soneca wrote: 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…

'de' also means 'the' in dutch, I thought you were just being clever.

no vs know; natives makes this mistake as well.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#205

Post by elboru »

ansimionescu wrote: post #174
devgutt wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind to share what is your process?

Just posting a lot on social media and news sites. I use Google Search, Google Translate, Mac's builtin dictionary, and Thesaurus.com (for synonyms/antonyms). Reading helps – you can "find" collections of ebooks for kindle/mobile quite easily (disclaimer: I don't support piracy, it's just that as a student I can't yet afford paying for 100% of what I consume).

I use google search a lot, when some sentence just doesn't sound right, I google it, if it has thousands or millions of results I accept it as right, if it has just some hundreds or less I rephrase it until I find a "popular" way of expressing what I want to say.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#206

Post by pjmlp »

Someone wrote: post #168
pjmlp wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what does it look inside private corporations? Except for the big international corporations, most of the stuff tends to be written on the country's language.

I think that's hugely dependent on the country. For languages with relatively few speakers translating (technical) texts into English is relatively more expensive, so people have to read more English to read e.g. books on programming. That makes them more proficient in reading English, thus decreasing the market for more expensive translations, leading to fewer translations, etc. Learning programming from English tex…

> I think that's hugely dependent on the country

Quite common in Spain, France and Germany to have code in local language, based on my experience working in these countries.

I already worked as code translator a few times, because of it.

Sometimes it helps to be a polyglot of human languages as well. :)

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#207

Post by pjmlp »

marcosdumay wrote: post #166
pjmlp wrote: post #136

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.

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.

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

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#208

Post by nsoonhui »

zhte415 wrote: post #182
soneca wrote: 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…

> edit: I noticed I just wrote "de" instead of "the". Stupidest mistake I often make. I've worked with a lot of developers from China, who themselves work with developers in India. On a conference call the China sysadmin announces they've verified the C Jia Jia environment and the India developer totally knows what they mean. C++ in Mandarin is pronounced C Jia Jia. Don't sweat it.

I am a Chinese but I don't understand what do you ( or they) mean by "they've verified the C Jia Jia environment".

Care to elaborate?

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#209

Post by 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?

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#210

Post by icelancer »

Aldo_MX wrote: post #150
icelancer wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your written English is better than the vast majority of our current undergraduate college students in America, so I really wouldn't worry about it.

Although native-English speakers are always nice enough to tell me that my English is "good enough" to be understood, there are times that I feel uneasy with myself, because I just lack the practice to be able to communicate fluently in English.

It's not that it's "good enough." It's actively better than most of the people I communicate with. Don't sell yourself short :)
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