Hacker News Reader

So why start a duplicate place for knowledge? Seems much simpler to integrate a translation system into the canonical English database. Existing entries can be translated into other languages and then improved upon. Hell, you could automate the entire first step and then crowd source the improvements.

View on HN

If the only goal was to present what exists in other languages, this would be a great idea. Your suggestion results in translations for all the people searching for content in a language other than English. But it doesn't allow those people to participate in return. You need the community of PT speakers to succeed (which is the whole reason we have separate sites for different topics, and the reason why we believe our model is better for expert answers than Yahoo Answers, Quora, et al).

Actually they are kind of doing that already. Someone who is fluent in both can arbitrage between the two for reputation.

Honestly you wouldn't want to translate all of SO anyway, there is a lot of cruft when you build up a huge database of information.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com