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Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

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Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#211

Post by zhemao »

goshx wrote: post #124

This is AWESOME! I even get emotional about this and here is why. TL;DR: I am a Brazilian and it would have been much easier for me if I had the resources I needed available in my mother language. Long story: I am a Brazilian. I was born in a small town in Brazil (population: 13k) and I only had access to public schools. Public schools in Brazil do have English classes, however all I remember was them teaching the ve…

> I never went to a real English school/class, as you can probably tell at this point by reading this

No, I couldn't. You give yourself too little credit. Except for "way much fun", everything you wrote was perfect idiomatic English.

I actually think a lot of us native English speakers are kind of jealous that we have little incentive to become proficient in a foreign language since so much of the worlds information and communication is in English. I know I am. I'm trying to learn Portuguese right now, just for fun, but I know I will never be as fluent in it as you are in English.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#212

Post by yaeger »

guelo wrote: post #86
rdtsc wrote: post #45

Programming specific I think is easier in English. I speak 3 languages and understand 4. Talking about programming, computer science and technology in non-Engish is awkward. It either is necessary to just use English terms anyway for every other noun or struggle with awkward translation of them. Things like kernel, doubly linked list, hash table, binary tree, greedy algorithm, they are all invented in English and whe…

I wonder how corporate programmers in non-english speaking countries communicate about programming. I would imagine that they use their local language for docs, commit descriptions, email lists, etc. I think most of the source code people can look at is for open source projects and they always go with english as the default even when there are mostly non-english speaking programmers. But what does it look inside priv…

German company, operations worldwide.

Language is English. English docs, English presentations.

Meetings are done in German unless a non-German sits in. Then, it is done in English.

I can't even begin to explain how awkward it is to see source code once in a great while where the dev used German words as variable names. Good luck trying to get a colleague to understand what'S going on if he doesn't speak German.

In short, you write in English so the lion share of the world can read it. And if people really have a question, they should be able to express that in English. What good does it to post that question in a language that can only be read by a fraction of the developer community?

And with that in mind, I also expect others, like Chinese devs to hand over source code with English variable and class names. Otherwise, again, who do they expect would be able to work with the code if the naming of things don't make sense?

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#213

Post by gbog »

lunchbox wrote: post #203
gbog wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> mutually unintelligible dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.)

But the trick is that when written on paper these dialects are mostly mutally intelligible.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#215

Post by emiliobumachar »

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…

I do not speak any language with that writing paradigm, but I can think of one big disadvantage: it's different memory efforts to learn a word's written and spoken forms.

In languages where letters are mapped to sounds, even after phonetics changed a bunch, the written and spoken forms are huge cues to each other. (There are exceptions).

If a new word came to be in English and it was written, for example, "scaramara", two fluent speakers who only saw it in writing would probably guess similar pronunciations for it, to the point that one would understand the other's speech. I suppose something like that could not happen in Chinese. Is this assumption correct?

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#216

Post by rev087 »

zanny wrote: post #155
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…

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…

It's interesting to think of the benefits a modern constructed language and script could bring, but a way to foster adoption would be a very difficult task. Esperanto has a lot of speakers world wide, but hardly in significant proportions.

Another interesting case is the Cherokee syllabary:

> Once Albert Gallatin saw a copy of Sequoyah's syllabary, he found the syllabary superior to the English alphabet. Even though the Cherokee student must learn 85 characters instead of 26, he can read immediately. The student could accomplish in a few weeks what students of English writing could learn in two years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#217

Post by loomio »

This is fantastic! Congrats to Stack Overflow and here's to more languages in the future.

We were shocked and delighted when our international user community had massive enthusiasm for translating our app into different languages, and now it's live in Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Greek, Vietnamese, Bahasa Indonian, Dutch and several other languages, with more like Telegu, Malayalam, and Japanese in the pipeline. It's opened up whole worlds of users who otherwise wouldn't have ever had access to the tool.

As some other commenters have noted, there is definitely a social inclusion aspect to releasing in various languages - not everyone has the same access to education around the world. Furthermore, we'll have a much richer community and society if we open communication to everyone and don't expect everyone to learn English, which is a more or less arbitrary standard. We've also recently released a feature where you can translate comments in the app instantly, meaning people who speak different languages can communicate in the same conversation! It's so cool to see.

We've had a great time using Transifex and I can recommend it to any software project hoping to support a translation community. For us as an open source project, we have been very grateful that all our translation has been done by volunteers, and Transifex makes it really easy to coordinate with them. If any other projects are interested in how we manage translation on a technical level, we wrote a blog post about it [0] and will be publishing another, more in-depth one, shortly.

[0] http://blog.loomio.org/2013/10/01/translating-loomio-2/

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#218

Post by lucian1900 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #164
lucian1900 wrote: post #42

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.

I completely agree. But while people don't learn English (what takes years), they shouldn't just stop all their other learning.

Sure, I'm not arguing against efforts to help people learn without English. But I do think such efforts should be seen as a stepping stone to the "real thing", which is the English-speaking community.

My personal wish is that children be taught English early enough so that this doesn't become an issue. I am quite grateful I started when I was 5 or 6.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#220

Post by whizzkid »

Solution to this idea should be reconsidered in my opinion.

Instead of creating pure language specific sites, smarter approach can be more helpful to everyone in the community. Let's give it a try;

  'Argument is not numeric (ArgumentError)'
What is there to write/ask differently about it in English or Portuguese? If a subsystem to stackoverflow is created for each language, you might be able to see the answers written by other native speakers. An accepted answer will always be in English but for the ones that can not understand what is going on, they can click on their preferred language button and see the explanation in Portuguese.

This would also give better overview of which country actually has more involved to specific topic and so on.

To keep in short, every question asked in stackoverflow has a localization button to see answers from different languages. If someone is not comfortable writing the answer in English then they can write it in Russian. Then, when an American checks the question in english with no answers, he/she can try to translate the answers from other languages. Which is a win/win for both parties

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