Comment by nandemo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nandemo | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not a StackOverflow user but I assume the askers and responders are almost all professional developers.

Your site is bound to attract "amateurs" who are just learning languages for disparate reasons. Nothing wrong with that, but a better analog to StackOverflow would be a forum embedded in a website for professional translators and the people who hire them. IIRC http://proz.com does have a simple forum for that but it's not very good.

I'd volunteer to answer questions on Portuguese, but there are none right now. I might check a few more times later. But that's just because I saw it here on HN and would be glad to help you getting it off the ground. Otherwise I wouldn't bother -- unless it was part of a professional translation site and participation had a positive effect on my chance of getting translation jobs.

Thanks for your feedback. However, I'm not sure why this site would be more likely to attract "amateurs" than StackOverflow. StackOverflow is not part of a freelancer marketplace either (the career site was only added very recently) and yet manages to get quality content. Thanks for your insight nonetheless, I will consider integrating the Q&A part with a "marketplace" in a second phase.

OK, I didn't express myself well. Let me try again.

I didn't mean that StackOverflow is like it is because of the career site. I don't know why it became successful. My main point is that people ask stuff there because it actually helps them do their job. This means:

1) Vague, badly written questions and do-my-homework requests are frowned upon. 2) It's a service that people would potentially pay for.

In contrast, on places like Yahoo Answers people ask all sorts of random questions and get an accordingly wide range of answers.

It might be that regardless of the professional nature, programming provides a higher barrier of entry than language study.

That's why I thought it would be good to market it to translators.

"programming provides a higher barrier of entry than language study". As a professional programmer, I never really realized this but now that you mention it, it totally makes sense. In that perspective, iRosetta is more likely to attract "amateurs". I'll try to come up with a strategy to market it to pros ;)

stackoverflow framework needs a subscription model and not just a notification service for answers on your questions.

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