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The idea:

I've recently come to realize that foreign SEs give excellent opportunities to learn new languages.

For example, I am interested in learning Russian and I love programming so what better than http://ru.stackoverflow.com ?

The problem:

I'm new to Russian, but through very long language analysis and hard work, I have been able to successfully answer two questions (I am quite proud).

On average it took me at least 45-60 minutes to answer each question.

The whole process is very time consuming (as expected!).

  1. I have to first decrypt the OP's question (longest part)
    • Find a way to copy the title (yeah try it right now.. title is a clickable link. Sometimes rather annoying to copy a word in the title !)
    • Copy & paste word by word into google translate to get an accurate translation
      • I find that copying full texts into some translator doesn't always give an accurate translation and doesn't help with the learning process.
  2. Then I have to find a solution (shortest part)
  3. Finally, I have to write an answer (long but fun part) !

The programming solution to those questions were not hard in themselves, but to understand the question and to explain what I did was challenging.

That's the learning process no?

The solution:

Is to reduce the whole comprehension time process.

The main reason why it took so long to answer the question was to understand the question asked ! To copy and paste certain words to google translator (and other such sites).

Imagine if I didn't have to copy and paste.

This leads to the final idea, to incorporate a translation module to foreign SEs.

API:

Google proposes an API for this (but of course not forced to use it, for you Bing fans out there, or whatever Translation API's exist out there)

UI:

Of course my vision of this solution is my own and I'm sure there are better idea's out there !

I don't think this option should be activated by default, it should located in Preferences in a user's Profile and Settings

image showing how to active translations Image showing how to activate translations. Only foreign stack exchange sites that the user is signed up on are shown.

The translation itself should be (my opinion) activated when the user hovers/clicks a word.

image with popup

The Conclusion:

I know that SE wasn't originally intended in learning new languages (irony when you think of SO), but it might be an added value to the SE community (definitely not for me to decide!)

I would personally use this all the time.

Side note:

As a last comment, I'm starting to understand what some non-english speaking people have to go through. Respect to them.

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  • Who will be doing this translate job? Oh ahahaha, please don't tell me you're asking for machine translation!
    – M.A.R.
    Jun 21, 2016 at 16:04
  • @TIPS I don't see what's so funny or wrong about asking.
    – kemicofa ghost
    Jun 21, 2016 at 16:06
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    Machine translation is far from being anything useful in SO scale. See this, this, this, and maybe a lot of other evidence somewhere else.
    – M.A.R.
    Jun 21, 2016 at 16:19
  • @TIPS I do understand where you're coming from. Machine translation is far from perfect. Yet machine translation will only get better with time. Which is why I pointed out in my post to only translate specific words and not phrases. Of course words can have multiple meanings, which would be nice to propose multiple translations for a word. Thank you though for the constructive critisism.
    – kemicofa ghost
    Jun 21, 2016 at 16:55

1 Answer 1

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Implementing this feature would give you the opportunity to learn a new language, but Stack Exchange is not Duolingo. I'm not sure Stack Exchange as a whole will benefit from more answers written by people who are not yet proficient in a certain language.

For the first step, you can already use the automatic translation features of some browsers, e.g. Chrome:

enter image description here

The quality of translations is mediocre at best, but I have seen a lot of questions in Stack Overflow in worse attempts at English. If you hover over a part of the text, you even see the original Russian text.

enter image description here

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  • Thanks for the quick response. You make a good point. It's true that Stack Exchange is not Duolingo. I do not entirely agree with this point will benefit from more answers written by people who are not yet proficient There are many people that ask questions or answer questions that are not proficient in english. Those questions/answers just get down voted. If the effort is put behind those questions/answers and that they are comprehensible to the reader, it should be ok?
    – kemicofa ghost
    Jun 21, 2016 at 15:25
  • It's true if I could activate the translate, but that beats the learning process? I see the translation without trying to figure it out on my own at first, but I do see your point.
    – kemicofa ghost
    Jun 21, 2016 at 15:25
  • @Avenoir: for the person who asks a question, a somewhat comprehensible answer is better than no (or a late) answer. But for a professional Q&A site as a whole, including future readers of the post, correct language is important. I'm probably just as annoyed as you with some of the English posts on Stack Overflow. Of course, your posts could be corrected by a native Russian speaker, but I feel that energy is better spent elsewhere. As is the enormous amount of effort from the SE dev team that this feature would require.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Jun 21, 2016 at 17:28
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    By the way, I'm not discouraging you from posting on ru.SO - I'm just trying to point out that it mostly benefits yourself, not SE. That's fine - thousands of regular SE users do this, knowingly and unknowingly. As for your studying of the Russian language: bonne chance & удачи!
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Jun 21, 2016 at 17:32

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