Earlier quoted context omitted.
Luckily, English is a language that is tolerant of mistakes.
English speakers often aren't.
That is unfortunately so. I'm so glad I didn't encounter any such Germans when I was in high school and college.
Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
161–170 of 260 posts
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#162I 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…
This is odd, but I've noticed that technical Chinese blogs auto-translate really well. I used to follow erlang-china.org, and rarely had a problem with understanding.
I have no idea how well it works the other way though, so my comments were all bare links.
A Chinese friend of mine guessed that it has something to do with how most Chinese words are built from other Chinese words, and the specificity of technical terms made the translations really easy and unambiguous. He explained it better than I just did:)
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#163This 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…
SO isn't anything special, or a complicated site. There is no reason a Portuguese equivalent couldn't be whipped up by someone from Portugal or Brazil.
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#164As 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.
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#165"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…
Agreed, writing posts/comments in English as a non-native speaker (with anxiety issues) is a real endeavour. Thankfully I've put so much time in it already that I can be reasonably certain that what I write is correct, and "flows" well, but I can definitely relate to your struggles.
Would you mind to share what is your process?
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#166As 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.
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#167I 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…
This is odd, but I've noticed that technical Chinese blogs auto-translate really well. I used to follow erlang-china.org, and rarely had a problem with understanding. I have no idea how well it works the other way though, so my comments were all bare links. A Chinese friend of mine guessed that it has something to do with how most Chinese words are built from other Chinese words, and the specificity of technical term…
Yes the translation is not bad at all, but to search that content in the first place? You probably want to know how to type Chinese :) and know how to master search in Chinese.
If you are from HK, people often write with cantonese slang words (it's like someone writing ya'll instead of you all - that sort of thing). Translation is not as good as translating formal Chinese writing :) but that's a minor thing.
I can understand 1/3 of the Japanese websites by knowing Kanji. And if you know English then you have the door to any language share the latin root.
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 texts will affect choice of variable names, function names, etc.
Dijkstra is a counterexample (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_(programming)#Functio...), but that was in 1965, when there weren't hours of subtitled English-language television each day, or thousands of programming texts that were only available in English.
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#169I think this is not the correct way to tackle the problem. Build a website in Portuguese will only divide instead of stimulate the participation of users which doesn't have English as native.
I'd like to propose a different approach:
For the users that speak Portuguese natively, make the questions, answers and comments all written in Portuguese FIRST, and, a English version MANDATORY afterwards (which would be the standard language).
The Portuguese-spoken users would see all this items also in Portuguese, and the remains in English.
The same for users of other languages. For those who speak only English, it would be no difference.
This approach has several advantages:
* It makes the user think in their native language, giving much better answers.
* The user is forced to make a second review in the answer when it was translated to English.
* The user will identify their language peers easily.
* The user will be more comfortable to participate, because the barrier to write in English is tremendous (much bigger than a lot of people think).
This way, I think you are able to keep a single website for ALL developers, stimulating participation.
======================================================================
Same comment in Portuguese (my native language, just for illustration)
======================================================================
Acho que isso não é uma forma adequada de tratar o problema. Criar um site em português irá dividir ao invés de estimular a participação destes usuários que não tem inglês nativo.
Gostaria de propôr uma solução, que no meu ponto-de-vista, seria bem melhor:
Para os usuários que falam Português nativamente, façam que todas as perguntas, respostas e comentários no site sejam escritos em Português, primeiramente, e adicionada, OBRIGATORIAMENTE, uma versão em inglês (que seria a língua comum).
Os usuários que falam Português nativo veriam automaticamente estes itens também em português, e o restante em inglês.
O mesmo para usuários de outras línguas. Para aqueles que falam apenas inglês, não teria nenhuma diferença.
Essa abordagem tem várias vantagens:
* Estimular que o usuário pense em sua língua nativa, fornecendo respostas muito mais precisas.
* Força o usuário fazer uma segunda revisão na resposta quando for traduzir para o inglês.
* O usuário nativo vai identificar os seus pares rapidamente.
* O usuário vai ficar mais confortável em participar, pois a barreira de escrever em inglês é enorme (maior do que muitos pensam)
Acho que desta forma poderia fazer um único site para TODOS os desenvolvedores, estimulando a participação.
Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
#170"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…
No one mentioned (?) it, but I still feel the shame.
I'm pretty verbose, I love my words, and people around me sometimes come to me with questions about words or their history and the like... and I still make the same mistakes you do. I often put the wrong word in when typing quickly, or edit the middle of a sentence forgetting to fix the overall context. Errors are not just due to proficiency in language, but also due to typing skills or low points in attention (pre-morning caffeine).
The thing is, most people will forgive minor mess-ups if it's clear what you actually meant. It's not something to worry about in internet commentary, which is more like an informal chat than formal writing. If you were writing a scientific paper or a politician's speech, this is the time to be concerned about the formal structure and specifics of what's going on.
Edit: it's not to say don't try, just to say don't beat yourself up over small mistakes.