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I have noticed there is a Stack Overflow in language differs from English which is global and mostly used by programmers.

I think there is no need for a site in other languages. Otherwise we will end up with 127 StackOverflow sites. I am afraid that we will lose the amount of people sharing data.

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    I wish I could vote to close this as a dupe of the blog post :P
    – Lix
    Feb 22, 2014 at 10:58
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    I think "too-broad" would be the correct close reason here because it really did take an entire blog post to answer this...
    – Lix
    Feb 22, 2014 at 11:00
  • funny to see CVs piling on here, as if closure would prevent similar questions from popping up
    – gnat
    Feb 22, 2014 at 11:20
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    Part of your concerns were addressed here: Do the benefits of having SO in multiple languages outweigh the risks involved?
    – Bart
    Feb 22, 2014 at 13:21

3 Answers 3

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The best and complete answer you could find is the blog post of Jay Hanlon, 1 week ago. Main ideas are:

  1. Not every developer in the world speaks English. Just reading the comments from our announcement, you’ll see multiple readers sharing that they or their colleagues (and one dad) couldn’t participate on SO due to language constraints.

  2. It’s almost impossible to feel like part of a community if you’re not highly proficient in the language. Even non-native speakers who are fluent enough to read posts in their second or third languages often aren’t comfortable enough to write in them.

  3. Requiring that all aspiring devs “just go learn English” first isn’t who we want to be. Even if I believed that every programmer must eventually master English, it still wouldn’t make any sense to make them do it first. I believe that everyone – everyone – who can really fall in love with programming should get a chance to.

You should really read the full blog post, it's really interesting I think if you're English native (which I'm not, and I understand the Portugese community then, I don't really this blog post ;) )

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Remember that Stack Overflow (in Portuguese) went through the same process as all other new sites in the SE network. It started as a proposal on Area51 and went through all the stages and is now in public beta.

This process guarantees that if there is a community large enough to generate enough good questions and answers it can launch, which is a fair process.

Personally I believe it is essential to leverage all available knowledge without language barriers. The language specific Stack Overflow sites do just that. It would be great to see interesting questions being raised and answers being given by people formerly unable to participate in the effective Q-and-A format of the SE-network. Interesting questions will migrate across language specific communities which is good and helps in getting answers in any language.

I'm looking forward to see the other language specific Stack Overflow launch, like:

I don't see a proposal yet for Stack Overflow in Chinese but that is a matter of time.

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Not every person in the world knows the English language.

  1. The person using the browser may not speak the language that the browser uses.
  2. The Portuguese version is to target local people as well as local advertisers. I would want my ad displayed in my local native language rather than in English as it makes more sense in the former than the latter.

To sum up, there may be large audience who might have requested Portuguese version of Stack Overflow

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    Hi, please don't use backticks (`) to highlight random words; they should only be used for actual code.
    – ben is uǝq backwards
    Feb 22, 2014 at 12:17

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