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Comment by zalew | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if i18n is such a good idea here. I've thought about it on a project I'm currently working on, and my conclusion is that sometimes you need to make the audience interact in a common language (in most cases English). If you i18n your UI, it may encourage your users to communicate in their native tongue and it will be a mess.

> Documentation, you neglected necessity of open-source. [..] Nothing too fancy; just click a button, parse my repository, and provide a list of public classes and members.

uhm, Sphinx?

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Yes and no - but your point is great in general. I think that there are cases where we who are fluent in English just overestimate the English skills of some people and countries.

While internationalization is not always preferable, as you point out, there are times where it means making a service or tool accessible to people who otherwise would not have access to it. We already know how dreadful the GitHub interface can be to newbies, not to mention the English language itself.

GitHub is such an important tool to developers and entrepreneurs that we should think very carefully about barring other people from using it inadvertently.

Internationalization will have adverse effects, definitely, but I still think the discussion of whether making GitHub English-only is worth deterring people who may not otherwise find their way into software development, programming, and the like. Just think of the many other ways people are starting to use GitHub.

But I for one dread the day I receive unsolicited Pull Requests in Russian for an undiscovered 0day vulnerability. :)

Non-native English speaker here, I volunteer at several companies to translate their interfaces.

Almost all people can read basic English (especially those who access Github), so translating the Github interface seems rather pointless to me. Of course, translating the support articles would really help accessibility for those who don't know English as well as native speakers.

Translating interfaces makes people think they can use their language to communicate on a site. Translating only the support articles helps people understand the site, but they will quickly realize that the site itself prefers English-only communication.

The bar to entry to newcomers is probably more of a UX/usability problem than one of internationalization; that I agree with you on.

Translating the support docs is one suggestion I think is unequivocally good, and something that should be done.

I think internationalization is great in a read-only capacity, but when non-English speakers start posting Issues, comments and Pull Requests, that's where it starts to turn into a problem.

GitHub has very little to translate in the first place, as it's very sparse on prose, so aside from the question of support docs, we are probably making mountain out of mole hills, since the remaining English is jargon and not beholden to internationalization concerns.

One way to deal with the problem of people communicating in a language the project does not understand would be to let repo owners set one or two languages for the repo. When users on GitHub en Español see an input box on their repo, it would be labeled: "Este proyecto sólo acepta contribuciones en inglés o alemán." It won't solve the problem completely, but it would at least make expectations clear.

My concern with this obvious suggestion for the problem is that GitHub has done extremely little to improve the Issue system, Pull Requests aside where merging and continuous integration has been improved.

Imagine being the proprietor of Twitter Bootstrap and having to deal with this. What is an acceptable rate of admission of issue creators who are not proficient in English?

If 20% of "international" users are undeterred by the warnings and labels, the repo owners should still receive a free coupon for Prozac from GitHub. :)

While I do completely agree with you (coming from a non-english-speaking country), from the "MONEY!" POV, localization makes sense even if it siloes communities, some countries's communities mostly (if not only) communicate in their mother tongue and tend to have little involvement outside that (russian and asian communities tend to do that a lot in my experience, though it may only be because they have the numbers and are thus easier to notice than e.g. italian or french)

I'm not so sure. I mean, what's the point especially in the context of programming? I am aware that contrary to popular opinion, there are a lot of geeks who don't speak English very well, yet localizing opensource IMO doesn't make much sense (except some rare cases of very specific local projects).

I'm from a non-en too, but frankly speaking I sometimes got problems reading docs when they use local nomenclature. Programming == English, like it or not.

btw, are there any localized words for 'forking', 'pull request'?

    btw, are there any localized words for 'forking',
    'pull request'?

As someone who lives in a country where English is not the native language, non-English languages will never be able to keep up with developing terminology and neologisms.

It is fine to translate "plain" language, but the terminology and jargon won't work very well when translated. It also has the additional downside of defeating look-ups and google-ability, which is one of the points of terminology. Not just considering the importance of Google, but Stack Overflow in particular.

it was more of a retorical question. in Polish there are even problems with follow/follower - almost every quasi-direct translation is ridiculous or creepy, so in the end every website invents their own or stick with some 'subscribe'. every time I work on a local project for a client I get into the horror of reinventing call2action messages.

It always ends up sounding incredibly corny. There is basically no way around it. :)

Agreed completely. In Argentinian Spanish we say "forkeá este proyecto" or "te mando un pull request" hehe. It think, it would be very problematic if we started translating this jargon.

Well the cultural domination is a real phenomenon. We use forkea (no tilde, accent on the o) in Perú. Even when playing Warcraft as a child, I used to say "construye más farmas" to my brother, using the inflection of the Spanish Language. But we use the same alphabet. I think Japanese and Russian folks are not as comfortable using English as a common language.

From my experience (I'm from non-en), a lot of non-en programmers can understand technical English decently well, but they cannot write it (or at least not enough to express complicated ideas). So they code with comments/issues in their local languages.

I've seen that at a number of local companies and since Github is used by companies too, it might make sense that the company can choose to have it localized.

I tend to agree for open source though : we need a lingua franca and it seems like English is the best pick for that.

In the end, maybe it should be up to the project to choose the interface language.

In Swedish you usually say "forka", "pulla" thus making the English verbs into Swedish forms, works quite well.

> yet localizing opensource IMO doesn't make much sense (except some rare cases of very specific local projects)

Do you mean open source in general or development tools in particular?

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