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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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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