Le proposte del tipo "<sito> in <lingua>" creano inaccettabili barriere linguistiche e vanno uccise con il massimo pregiudizio

Question

You're probably reading that and thinking, "what?!", and reaching for your close votes or your edit sticks. And that's a perfectly good thing. That's precisely the kind of feeling I want.

What on earth did I just write in the title? What is that horrible garbage? Italian? Oh my; who speaks that? What did I just say there? Imagine this question was completely written in Italian. How would that question be useful to the 99% of the world that doesn't speak Italian?

Think it was a programming question - for all you know, it is, since you can't understand it. Then what are the chances it isn't a question already asked on Stack Overflow? Do we need to have experts in translation now?

Actually, come think of it, what if it isn't a question on Stack Overflow? What if it's the first question about whatever thing it is that thingadongdong question title is asking, and it got an excellent answer, and now nobody but people that can speak Italian can access it?

That would be pretty terrible, wouldn't it?

So:

"<site> in <language>" proposals create unacceptable language barriers and must be killed with extreme prejudice

(Yes, that's what the title says. Hence the <h1>. Sorry.)

I'll take a short but correct Engrish answer over the best Jon Skeet treat ever on the site - but in Japanese, and through Google Translate easily, any day.

Just consider this: you're Adam Lear. An expert programmer that speaks Russian and English fluently. You have a programming question. Where do you ask? Why would you ask on ru.SO over en.SO? Asking on both sites would probably be the "better" thing. Now you have an expert that needs to spend twice as much time while asking a question so he can also provide a question in the localized site.

Let's now say the answer on en.SO arrives from me, because I'm a lucky Italian dude that just happened to stumble on the problem before Adam did. Now Adam "has to" translate my answer to ru.SO, so that no ru.SO user spends time pointlessly in solving something that's already been addressed. So our expert is spending thrice as much time on any question he asks in an effort to do The Right Thing™. That doesn't scale, obviously, and now Adam needs to pick which site needs to take his attention. (Nevermind for the moment he's a moderator - bear with me.)

No matter what Adam's choice is, one of the two sites has just lost an expert to the language barrier.

It's not just that. There's me too. I now have a good answer on en.SE, but no question for it for it.SE. What do I do? Yeah! I'll just translate Adam's question on it.SO! But, you know, I really like reputation. And I really like feeling like I'm helping people! You know what? Screw this: I'm going to hook up the Bing translate API and just start translating everything from one language copy to the other in order to reap the most reputation!

So long as the translation is "good enough" people won't mind right? I mean, we already do accept Engrish and Babelfish on en.SO, why should ru.SO require people to use perfect Russian? What if I'm Romanian, don't know English but know just a little Russian? Since "Stack Overflow in Romanian" probably won't happen, Google Translate would probably be my only choice.

Having multiple dumb copies of a Stack Exchange site in multiple language is just a ton of trouble waiting to happen, a time sink for the English as Second Language users you have and very little value for the internet at large, in a world where compulsory English teaching becomes increasingly pervasive.

What's next? "English Language and Usage... in French?" "Gaming... in German?" What domain name would you give those sites?

What about meta? English Ask Ubuntu is okay with software-rec's... but is Spanish Ask Ubuntu equally accomodating?

How many perfectly identical Area 51 proposals do we need where the only thing that changes in the title is one word? Do we really want to see this happening? Isn't having a SE proposal for every single language, dead or alive, enough Stack Exchange sites? How can this possibly scale? Does the world have enough experts willing to moderate all those sites? Are we going to reach a point where everybody has a diamond somewhere?

If it doesn't make sense to have Judean People’s Front.SE and People’s Front of Judea.SE and Judean Popular People’s Front.SE and Popular Front of Judea.SE, why does it make sense to have Judean People's Front.SE and Fronte Popolare di Giuda.SE and Judese Volksfront.SE and ユダヤの人民戦線.SE?

Related reading: Aaronut on "Cucina Italiana.SE"

Answer 1

Well, since I'm the example child for this question (and I am, in fact, fluent in both Russian and English)... :)

I think this depends. If I'm fluent in both languages, I might still be only active in one linguistic community over the other. Russian has a pretty active internet culture, and I imagine it's similar for other languages (although possibly not all of them).

I happen to be mostly active in the English-speaking side of the internet, but there are people who are fluent in English but still frequent a lot of Russian sites. That's probably fairly likely for people who actually still live in Russia.

Now, regardless of which linguistic affiliation I maintain, it is up to me to decide where to post my question. It doesn't have to be duplicated in every other language available. You're welcome to translate it if you want, but I don't care. It's no longer my question at that point. It's yours to deal with. If you think the automatic Bing translator is going to produce good enough results for you to farm rep, then a) you don't know Russian; b) you're welcome to whatever rep you get from it.

I see potential issues with moderation and ensuring adherence to the network standards. Stack Exchange cannot possibly hire an expert in every language. Even the existing language-specific sites (while awesome in principle) could be potentially problematic. But beyond that... if Stack Exchange as a company doesn't have a problem with that and there's enough community backing to start a site, why not do it? I don't see a problem with it. A person who'd otherwise come to the English SO but doesn't have a strong enough command of English can use a site they're more comfortable with, and people who are fluent in both can pick for themselves and the network as a whole will still be stronger for it.

Answer 2

So, your point of view is that everyone who is important will know English enough to participate in an English-only site, and people who are not able to do so, must be excluded, just so the English-speaking ones have an easier life.

The motto of Stack Exchange is Make the world a better place, not Make the world a better place for English speakers.

As I understood the current concept of Stack Exchange, every topic which finds a community will have a chance in the Area51 process. And "Italian-language questions about Programming" are certainly now off-topic (or otherwise not allowed) in Stack Overflow (and every other SE site), so it is not a duplicate.

If there are enough people who want to ask/answer in Italian about programming problems, they should have their own site.

Yes, this will draw some people away who otherwise would have posted on other sites, but this also happens if you open more sites on other topics in English (for example, I'm quite less active on SO now after crypto.SE opened - my total SE time is limited). On the other hand, more new people will participate.

Your example with Adam is a straw man: Nobody is forced to translate his own questions/answers (though if one posts in two languages, one should be polite enough to put links). If someone wants to get reputation by translating an answer, let him do so.

Answer 3

There are three different outcomes here:

• No other languages on SE but English. Great, but you reach a natural ceiling once you've found all the people who know English.
• Foreign languages on SE, but you disallow separate sites. Then you have communities inside say SO who speak English, Portugese, Klingon etc. Aside from the huge moderation issue this causes, it also fragments the community along barriers where communication is impossible - you allow say Arabic speakers to close a Chinese question? People can find enough else to disagree on as it is on SE.

• Foreign language for an existing topic means one site per topic forming a community around that topic only if critical mass is obtained. Risks here include watering down existing sites' contribution base as strong English speakers migrate to their native tongue sites. Other problems include foreign language "buy in" from total non-English speakers - how do you get it to happen when SE is currently "English".

  Note my use of logic phrasing. To make that even clearer, critical mass implies site creation; site proposal/creation does not imply critical mass.

You're essentially looking to find the least friction solution here. Supporting many languages and keeping things running smoothly is hard, but it can work. Of them, I think number 3 is that solution, assuming number 1 is unacceptable. Creating communities using a common language as a basis works because everyone who speaks it should in theory be able to get on in that community.

Answer 4

At the most basic level, site really does consist of a topic in a certain language. Currently, the language is English unless specified otherwise. If you spoke a foreign language, and wanted to have Q&A in your own language because you were more comfortable with it, because your friends wanted it, or because it was a better language for the topic, what topic would you propose? The initial and obvious choice is the language of the site you're currently active on. Most of the time, this is Stack Overflow.

Proposals are currently about topics which presently exist on the Stack Exchange network because the English version of the topic is the site on which the creator originated. It's something of a leap to come up with an entirely new topic for discussion; there's already a user base, scope, and example questions available in English, so it seems logical (the problems expressed in the question aside) to create a version of the site in the creator's mother tongue.

The only sites for which using a language other than English makes real sense are the <Language other than English> Language & Usage sites. For the rest, indeed, it would be better if the creators would just use the pre-existing, unfragmented English sites, doggone it! They speak English, why won't they use it?

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The creators are English speakers because they have to be, as mandated by Joel and Robert. These multilingual people have some 6 billion friends, relatives, and coworkers who don't speak English and are unable to participate in the network!

What's happening right now is that the multilingual users are creating <Language other than English> Language & Usage sites. Spanish, French, German, and Japanese are all in public betas. Each of these sites has users with accounts nowhere else on the site. English still features prominently in the site, but I expect that we'll soon have users who speak no English and have no experience anywhere else on the network.

These users will learn about the Stack Exchange platform. They'll think to themselves, "I wish there was a site about <Topic>, without any prompting from an existing site about that topic. They'll learn about Area51, gather momentum on their respective metas and chat rooms, and get a friend who speaks English (or Bablefish/Google Translate) to propose a site. They'll pile on the votes, followers, and committments, still working through translations. And eventually, we'd have a site that doesn't have any English.

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We're not there yet. Current proposals exist only by siphoning off other Stack Exchange sites. They are proposed by users active on those sites. These proposals should be closed. However, Stack Exchange, Inc. should to prepare to localize the platform to allow language specific sites that don't require the users to speak English.

Answer 5

I'm inclined to agree with badp.

One of the reasons my 'French-English' translation proposal didn't get off the ground (I believe) is because it wasn't going to be scalable (the number of potential language pairs is finite, but even so...)

It would be the same if we went for 'Topic-Language' pairs.

I'd be more inclined to go with tagging questions with their language, and then people can filter by languages. I guess you could then say "what's the difference between that and having separate sites?" Well the difference would be for multilingual people - they wouldn't have to chop and change (or choose) between sites.

You could retort "yes, but those people are in the minority", but that is back to the same logic that said we didn't need internationalization in the first place. (And note that there are at least 6 multilinguists participating here)

Answer 6

Executive Summary

Same-topic different-language sites turn any bilingual speaker willing to participate in to the combined knowledge of the entire English language SO, plus their own knowledge.

Linguists become Darin Balus Skeet

With understanding of Japanese and English, any time a c# question is asked, I can just do a quick search on SO and find a Jon Skeet answer that solves my problem, slap a quick translation on, and post that as an answer. I don't know c#, and my translation may not be perfect, but once I do this a few dozen times, and the community edits the parts I am lacking in, the site ends up with a high-quality answer through the merits of collective editing and a brief translation.

Improved Tools

This process could be made even easier in the future by using keywords to try to find English answers to Russian questions based on function names, code snippets, tag relations, etc. It is not just a duplicate on the side, more data, some community love, and a little development effort means we end up with a better resource, and a better idea of how to find solutions regardless of language. And that's going to improve the internet. That's our goal, right?

Volunteer Effort

People are all volunteers here. If people want to actually take the time and effort to make this work, it doesn't make much sense to stop them. Perhaps it will fail. Perhaps it will succeed. But creating reasoning saying "English works for me" as a reason not to provide tools to other people who English doesn't work for seems counter to the concept of SE in general.

Answering Your Questions

The concept is simple. If a community supports a different language, then non-supporters shouldn't put a damper on their enthusiasm.

How many perfectly identical Area 51 proposals do we need where the only thing that changes in the title is one word?

As many as the community is willing to volunteer their time to support and make succeed.

Isn't having a SE proposal for every single language, dead or alive, enough Stack Exchange sites?

I think it would be too much, as I can't imagine much demand for SO in Latin. But if the Pope decides to commit to so.latin, I am all for having every single language that will be supported by the community.

How can this possibly scale?

With billions of non-English speakers out there, I would think it could scale pretty well.

Does the world have enough experts willing to moderate all those sites?

If there are enough experts to moderate russian.so, why does it matter if there aren't enough experts for aramaic.so?

^{Note: I did not answer the rhetorical and/or egregious straw man arguments}

Answer 7

Ben oui, c'est exactement pour ça que ces propositions sont parfaitement légitimes et naturelles.

La langue est une barrière. Un site en anglais est inutile pour des gens qui ne parlent pas du tout anglais.

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Well, yes, that's exactly why these proposals are perfectly legitimate and natural.

Language is a barrier. A site in English is useless to people who do not speak English at all.

Answer 8

English is the best technical language. Any other language is going to inherently suffer from bad-quality posts. I agree that English should be the "official" language of SO - creating other sites just fragments things.

In my opinion, the easiest way to fix things is to introduce a meta tag for each area51-approved language. A good meta tag - people would actively follow/ignore this tag. Editing it in wouldn't be a hassle - it's much easier to identify a language than to speak it.

Even better, build it into the system. A gamified translation system would make the language barrier disappear.