Announcing Stack Overflow in Portuguese
blog.stackoverflow.com
blog.stackoverflow.com
>One reason localization has been a very low priority is that we feel for our particular audience, namely programmers, English is the de facto standard language. Not that other languages aren’t important, but it’s easier to get engineering work done when everything coalesces around a standard language.
>Joel believes that there are five “important” languages that programming content should eventually be localized into: German, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Japanese.
> >One reason localization has been a very low priority is that we feel for our particular audience, namely programmers, English is the de facto standard language. Not that other languages aren’t important, but it’s easier to get engineering work done when everything coalesces around a standard language.
I'm gonna assume that Jeff Atwood said this. Does he speak more than one language? Because although how reasonable it seems that English is incredibly widespread among programmers, I think that any monolingual English speaker is going to have a very biased perception of the English literacy of programmers in a more international setting.
I have no problem believing that English is the most widespread auxiliary language in programming. But I'm not so sure about what percentage of programmers worldwide speak or write English, which the given quote seems to implicitly make a statement about.
If we are to share knowledge we must speak a common language. A much better use of resources would have been intensive English for IT learning program that could bring people to speed.
And the high quality content found on the Brazilian SO will have hard time finding its way to the main site.
What about Wikipedia? I think they are benefiting from being multi-language.
> English is the standard language for the IT for better or worse.
All programmers are certainly not fluent in english. Reading code/documentation is one thing, having a discussion / asking a question is different.
Most non native english speakers probably don't feel confident enough to ask questions on english speaking forums like SO.
On the flip side, people are feeling too confident about asking questions on pt.stackoverflow.com, lowering the SNR quite a bit. But I don't know how English SO was at the beginning, and I wouldn't be surprised if it also took them a while to establish the current quality standards.
Yes, but obviously, you can read English. Most people can't.
> A good answer in English helps the whole [programming] world.
There is only about 1/10th of the population that speak English as first or second language[1]. I am sure that there are plenty of people that could use a good Q/A website where they can ask questions in their mother tong.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_numb...
(Japan is a great example of a place where there are very few devs who even want to consume programming information in English, let alone exchange it that way.)
As a native English speaker, I imagine myself at a professional meetup or cocktail party where everyone else is speaking French (which I studied in college). How many jokes would I tell? How many would I even understand?. The point is, I can function, and understand all the words, but I can't really feel like a fully-integrated part of the group, and the whole thing is hard work. Can I get mission critical information? Yeah. Do I want to hang out there and try to help others? No - even though I may have mastered the topic, the language gap makes me feel less excited and less qualified than I would in an all-english group.
[1]: Cards on table, I am effectively monolingual (can read simple French, can arguably read English far enough back in time that's it's not really the same language anymore, but that's not practically useful for programming), but IMHO that's mostly because I just have no options here for being immersed in another language, or I'd pick one up. I've taken a stab a couple of times at learning other languages but with zero (natural) opportunity to speak it to anybody else it's been an uphill battle to convince my brain it's worth doing; it keeps optimizing away the second language and, abstractly, it's correct, and that's hard to argue with....
but you could have a kind of hazing reaction - people tend to believe that if they have done something and it was hard/unpleasant then it must have been worth doing and other people should have to do it as well.
ps: English is not my first language
And much longer ago I had to work on a PET BASIC program for a RnD project for BS 5750 (aka ISO 9000) all of the comments where in Gaelic :-)
We didn't think that having the site one language only would be a problem. After all, most programmers speak English, right? Even programming languages themselves are in English, isn't that right? But we forgot something very important:
We weren't writing a technical manual. We were building a community.
It took a while, but we finally understood what most of you already knew. It's very difficult to be part of a community that, literally, doesn't speak your language.
The point they're trying to make here is that it's one thing to read technical documentation in your non-native language, but it's quite another to try and constructively participate in a community, where there's a lot of complex, back-and-forth discussions, and things need to be explained clearly.
It's true that, for an individual developer, learning English well will open up these sorts of communities. But so long as people aren't yet doing that, communities like pt.SO will be a big help.
Everybody is exposed to some English, but not all people are exposed to the same English. Every non-native speaker is using available media to learn the language, so you'll have people who know bad newspaper English, then people fluent in TV-Drama English and finally those speaking and writing "Broken English" (looking at you, facebook, 4chan, etc.).
So people will be _using_ non-intersecting vocabularies in their own contributions. They would actually have to learn Simple English as another skill first.
I'm still hoping for a babelfish universe in which a combination of technology and our own mental meaning recognition facilities makes languages a non-issue.
Of course, at this point your mileage may vary. I'd probably not be writing this if 90% of the text I encountered was Chinese, since I have to rely 100% on translation tools to read that. But we're getting there (hopefully).
Queríamos começar com uma comunidade que atendesse a dois requisitos:
1) Um grande número de desenvolvedores talentosos, em que 2) Grande parte deles se sentisse muito mais confortável em falar sua própria língua do que o inglês
Which roughly translates to: We wanted to start with a community that fulfilled two criteria: 1) A large number of talented developers in which, 2) A large part of them would be much more comfortable speaking their own language instead of english.
Then they have a map with visitors per month from Portuguese speaking countries: Brazil: 3.4M, Portugal 1M, plus Angola, Mozambique and other smaller countries with some visitors per month.
Quantcast shows ~200K uniques from Portugal, which seems much closer to reality.
It seems interesting that this is so separated from the main Q&A database of questions when so much of the information is easily accessible with tools like Google Translate and knowledge of similar languages (Spanish, for example).
People forget that most people working in software are in corporate jobs(or `website jobs` e.g.: PHP+Jquery), and there lies most people that don't care that much about perfecting the skills etc, i.e.: People that take it as a job and not a craft(and I'm fine with this, honestly)
So this may capture lower grade q and a's but it doesn't matter.. for example, I do speak english and it's very probable that I won't use much pt.stackoverflow if at all, just like I didn't browse the countless brasilian PHP, Java, JQuery, RoR forums and `Something-BR` discussion lists and groups before, but the people in there may do
So in my opinion it's irrelevant what you say about English being such a must and that it won't be as high-quality, to the people that will use it, it will be useful
To be a 'development is my craft' kind in fact English is essential, but that's just a small slice of the pie, to SO, it's business, or am I wrong?
The cost for this is really high and now I see that most of my friends who didn't learn from an early age are probably not learning it anymore(time and money issues) and, if they do, their English will still not be very good
As a brazilian, I am not sure why that is, but I can make some guesses:
- Public education sucks (at least before you get to the university level) so we can just disregard that.
- Top private schools are outstanding. There's a lot of competition to get in the public universities, so the competition is fierce, among students and schools. However, that doesn't apply to English at all. They'll teach the english text comprehension skills required to get into a university and nothing more. I am sure there are exceptions, but that seems to be the rule.
- Private English courses range from terrible to great. There are several reasons for that, but that difference is not always reflected in their cost and it is not trivial to tell them apart. It usually takes several years to get from zero to a level where the student can talk to a native speaker. It is entirely possible for someone to enroll in a Comp. Sci course and an English one at the same time, and finish Comp. Sci, while being halfway through the English one.
I am not sure how that compares to the rest of the world. But the perception is that learning English takes a lot of effort, and "I'm already employed, so why bother?". The issue here obviously is that it shouldn't take that much time - we are not interested in fluency here - but if it did, then the opportunity cost would be too high indeed.
People only start taking English seriously when they get outside offers (which they fail to qualify), or start working for a company with foreign clients. By then, it is too late.
The advice I give to everyone is to make English the number one priority, but don't bother too much with formal schools. Things like movies, CNN and online games (with VOIP) can teach you the basics much faster. And most importantly, train the ears to recognize English phonemes. After that, you can get a teacher/institution to fill in the gaps. That saves a lot of time, because you'll rank much higher in placement tests, shaving whole years of slow learning.
As for the new site, I believe it will become an island of people that are unwilling to learn English. I am not sure what that says about their willingness to learn anything else...
Although as you can see from this text, I can read and write english, I am a absolute minority in Brazil, most people here don't understand english at ALL, just look at the map in the post, they had 3.4M Brazillian visitors, and 1M Portuguese visitors, but Brazil has 200 million people, portugal has 10 million people, this means that Brazil with literally 20 times more people than Portugal, can only have 3 times the visits on a english speaking site.
Compare this to Brazil own internet use, Brazil is one of the countries with widest internet use, its internet culture resemble Japan and China, where it has a very strong "local" internet, because people don't know any other foreign language.
Some people might say: "But to code you must know english!" Well, you don't, I started coding when I was 6 years old, taught by my dad, that still does not know english, what happen in those cases, is that keywords (like goto, print, etc...) are just that, keywords, they are like mantra, enchantments, magic words that you type, and the computer do something, when I learned GWBASIC I had no idea what "if, else, then" meant, except they were mandatory when I wanted to control program flow, I had no idea what "GOTO" means, except that it made the program jump to somewhere else, the first time I saw "GOTO" written as "go to" I was amazed to learn that it was actually two words!
And this still stands, my dad, and most of my co-workers (I worked once in a company with 40 programmers, only 4 knew english), they might even search stuff in google in english, but usually they do this for example by copying and pasting errors from the compiler, the error is in english, but they have no idea what is the literal meaning or translation, and after the search is done, they use google translate.
Portuguese language programming groups are very strong here, for example I am in the C++, Android, Lua and some other mailing lists, there is almost no connection between those lists and the english language ones, because the overlap is too thin, few people in the portuguese speaking lists know english, and the ones that DO know english, keep themselves to english lists because of higher volume and content.
I expect that pt.so will take some time to reach the original SO quality, but I also expect it to mean much for brazillian community.
And curse you SO devs, I wanted to make that as my startup! :P (I am half-serious, if I had time I would have made PT SO myself)
Um grande número de desenvolvedores talentosos, em que Grande parte deles se sentisse muito mais confortável em falar sua própria língua do que o inglês
Why start with portugese?
We wanted to begin with a community that fulfilled two requisites:
Having a large number of talented developers and many of them feeling much more comfortable speaking their own language than English.
It seems to me this is a move to catch Brazilian developers, a wise move I'd say.
About Hindi: keep in mind that English is still an official Indian language, especially since the English Language Amendment Bill.
About Arabic: there are several kinds of Arabic, and not all are mutually intelligible. As a result, the number of people speaking it is a controversial figure... you can then compare the 200 million of native Portuguese speakers with the 280 million of native Modern Standard Arabic speakers.
India (mostly) speaks english at a level that allows them to participate in the "original" Stackoverflow.
Arabic? As much as there is a big population, I would venture that there is not enough demand.
Brazil, OTOH, is a reasonably industrialized country with some industries that are quite advanced: Genomics and Banking come to mind. It has the 3rd or 4th largest telecommunications infrastructure in the world. Put that together with the fact they can't speak English that well and you have a big under-served audience.
Though the cynic in me thinks that this is just a way to contain the pesky Brazilians, who are known for not being exactly civil in online communities. By letting the less educated Brazilians have their own yard, they won't do as much damage to the main property.
Ps: shout out to Gabriel (Gabe). He worked with us for a year or so and it was a pleasure to have him on the team. Great guy, super smart and zero ego.
But I don't think it's in the SO best interest to contain any group. They already have a moderation system for dealing with anoying people. I'd put that cinic at rest.
What this will achieve is making learning to program much easier for portugueese speaking people. A much needed thing. But I doubt that anybody will stop searching problems in english, just the sheer number and selection bias are enough to keep the best content in english.
Anyway, great icon. Stack Overflow with cedilha!
As for the youth that doesn't speak English well yet, I suppose they could see the low quality that this PT-SO would be as an incentive to actually start learning it :-)
[0] https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/23539/stack-overf...
>[Nota do tradutor: Porque português é a melhor língua, o Brasil é o melhor país e o Jay não consegue ler o que a gente escreve ;)]
>Queríamos começar com uma comunidade que atendesse a dois requisitos:
>Um grande número de desenvolvedores talentosos, em que Grande parte deles se sentisse muito mais confortável em falar sua própria língua do que o inglês
>Então a escolha foi muito simples. O Brasil conta com uma das maiores e mais fortes comunidades de programação do mundo, e isso sem contar Portugal, Moçambique, Angola e outros países menores que acrescentam ainda mais desenvolvedores talentos a esse grupo.
Why start with portuguese?
We wanted to start a community that met two goals:
A big number of talented developers that did feel much more confortable to speak in its own native language than in english.
Then the choise was pretty simple. Brazil have one of the stronger and vibrant programmer communities in the world, and lets not forget about Portugal, Moçambique(how is this spelled in english?) and Angola that adds even more to the talented pool of developers in this group
I dont know if its because the country is so big.. but culturally people dont care enough for english.. its something everybody wants to know about, of course .. but only the kids of the rich people that can pay for extensive english private class in expensive courses can handle it.. also they create couses with years (2 to 4) long courses.. so they end to be very expensive.. so its something that get in the end of the list of needs..
For instance, i am lucky, cause i learned it from movies when i was teenager, with subtitles on it.. it just happen naturally.. and also.. i needed to go further, as i work with technology.. and yeah.. the good things are in english.. so reading just completed the understanding of it..
but i see a ton of people here(in Brazil), (VERY GOOD hackers) that wont touch this world, because its in english.. Brazillian communitites always have a life on its own.. with its own culture.. like a little bubble .. (remember the Orkut phenomenon?)
Thats why Brazil is such a good opportunity for underdogs.. it doesnt follow too much the political fashion/tendency of the world.. Brazil has a move on its own.. you need to be here enough time to feel it.. and its vibrant..alive..
But its also not isolated.. its has much more in common with US than most of the people think.. with a destiny on its own
This seems to be a newer trend. The courses used to be much longer than that, to the order of 8 to 10 years.
Yeah, you read that right. Unless you took shortcuts (I had placement tests every once a while which let me skip several years), you'd spend a decade 'learning' English.
They were either creating the curriculum for the lowest common denominator, or the courses were a scam.
My brother skipped all the nonsense and learned enough English to have meaning conversations at age 8, playing Ultima Online. Then a couple of semesters after that helped with the vocabulary and pronunciation.
That, and movies, and setting the operating system to English, after some nagging on my part.
> The basic questions - those that once plagued every programmer - have not yet been made. You can write a question or definitive answer that will help tens of thousands of programmers in the future. (Oh, and do not worry if your question is already on the site in English.'ll Build you a website just for developers who speak Portuguese no longer need to use English to learn new things!)
Why not just provide machine translated versions of the original English questions with option to improve the translation?
I think that creating a brand new site will just split the large SO community and won't achieve much. Especially since you drastically limit the audience willing/able to answer the question.
However machine translation isn't quite there yet (judging by the quality of Microsoft's MSDN-articles translated into German). The topics I read about there, or on Stackoverflow are by definition situated right at the border of my current understanding; a few translation ambiguities or odd word choices push it over the edge and I might not "get" it.
So I doubt building a community on machine-translated articles would work.
For people saying that programmers need to know English. I agree, I speak English as a second language myself. However, learning English is not easy for everybody as isn't learning programming. Some people find easier to learn something in their native language. They can learn English later. Also, you can be a good programmer without speaking English at all, provided you have access to learning material. (Naturally, speaking English will be a huge advantage)
In the 1600s you had to speak Italian fluently if you wanted to be a musician. Today you can learn the meaning of words like "forte" and "stringendo", without having to really speak Italian. Programming is pretty much the same; one can learn the meaning of things like "if" and "function" and learn the big concepts (abstraction, algorithms, etc) in their language.
EDIT: formatting
Code I suppose when you boil down to it is just a higher-level, human-readable representation of a set of logic operations that can be represented by logical operators. Of course, most programmers don't grow to learn that way but by hacking when they are young and groking the big concepts as you say, like Zen buddhists rumminating on weeks on koans under the guidance of the abbots of the temple (HN, Github, listserv, irc etc.)
I suppose that's the difference between looking at the two things as symbols operations or a narrative. So I offer the following koan, is it necessary to know the history of the Mississippi Delta or the ethics of Linus/RMS to be able to fully play the Blues or contribute a patch to the Linux Kernel?
My dad is one of the best programmers I ever saw, and he tried VERY, VERY, VERY hard for 30 years already, and don't understand english at all.
What he do is search in english (or try to), and then use google translate to read the results.
Also I once worked in a company with 40 programmers, only 4 could read and write in english well enough to use StackOverflow, the others knew only the programming language keywords (in the sense of what they did even, not what they meant in english), and sometimes barely enough to use english google + google translate.
Grande parte deles se sentisse muito mais confortável em falar sua própria língua do que o inglês
Most of them feel more comfortable speaking own language than english
Although english is a must be for a developer, there's a lot of people who can't even read.
(Or pull a reverse-Cookpad and professionally translate the best answers.)
I'm not sure whether it's because of the generally poor level of English comprehension, or just that Japanese techies buy a lot of books. In any case O'Reilly seems happy about it.
I really fear if they have a bunch of subdomains and my question is answered in another language that it'll be a PITA to translate.. but I guess that's how non-english speakers feel too.
That let us drop the political implications, and also use an 'engineered language', with an easier learning curve.
How would you know that? Not every Portuguese speaking user here in from Brazil, and as one of them, frankly I don't have any idea of the English proficiency of Brazilian programmers.
But I understand the initiative. If brazilians can't write in portuguese, imagine their english.
The think is that stackoverflow is a great resource and even when it is true that English is the standard language in software, it is also true that a lot of developers living in non-english speaking countries don't domain the language, this is specially true if they are teenagers.
Good point. Many on here talk about how they got started programming when they were 12 or whatever; I don't know how fast kids learn a foreign language like English these days, but it will certainly vary by country, and for them to have more resources in their own tongue could make programming much more approachable.
My statement may seem false if you only inspect the first pages. Though I seem to remember that the majority of the exploitable repositories were in fact Portugese or Spanish.
Source: https://github.com/search?q=mysql+%24_GET&type=Code&ref=sear...
So, yeah, there's a lot of potential for this.
"I am from Brazil." // "Sou do Brasil."
More fun fact, it's pronounced brah-zew like you're saying eww gross.
BR? BR? BR? gibe moni plos.
Maybe you are in a position to have more sympathy with people who can't speak English, since you used to be in that same boat. But it's not as if having an English-only programming community is of any detriment to you, personally.