I am an immigrant from China and I came to the States after finishing sixth grade so I can still read and write in Chinese. Perfectly excellent. The advantage of that is I can utilize more resources that are only available in Chinese. You'd surprise how often Chinese programmers leave useful code snippets or tips in Chinese. So knowing a foreign language can definitely help.
While I agree having a non-English version helps growing the community (as pointed out in the article it could help a young girl to get started), but I am worrying about fragmentation. Also, SO tends to be pretty strict about the way a post is written - so a little girl who is making a post will either be closed or forced to edit. I don't know - it is as if I want people to take the hard route because it can benefit them in the long run.
I really have a mixed feelings about this too.
Side note:
That probably limits the list of potential candidates to Mandarin, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian...
Hmmm it's Chinese since people write in Chinese characters. Mandarin is a dialectic.
This is odd, but I've noticed that technical Chinese blogs auto-translate really well. I used to follow erlang-china.org, and rarely had a problem with understanding.
I have no idea how well it works the other way though, so my comments were all bare links.
A Chinese friend of mine guessed that it has something to do with how most Chinese words are built from other Chinese words, and the specificity of technical terms made the translations really easy and unambiguous. He explained it better than I just did:)
Yes the translation is not bad at all, but to search that content in the first place? You probably want to know how to type Chinese :) and know how to master search in Chinese.
If you are from HK, people often write with cantonese slang words (it's like someone writing ya'll instead of you all - that sort of thing). Translation is not as good as translating formal Chinese writing :) but that's a minor thing.
I can understand 1/3 of the Japanese websites by knowing Kanji. And if you know English then you have the door to any language share the latin root.
A point of clarification: the new site has intentionally relaxed rules. SO is a mature site that can afford to have stricter criteria, but pt.so is still in its infancy and the protocol is growing to meet the needs of the community that forms there.
> SO tends to be pretty strict about the way a post is written - so a little girl who is making a post will either be closed or forced to edit.
Questions are only closed if nobody can understand them, not because of grammar. So this little girl wouldn't have gotten her question answered regardless of whether the question was closed, simply because it wasn't clear.
If grammar is lacking but it's understandable, people will either leave it be or edit it to upgrade the English. At least, that is my experience on the IT Security StackExchange site (the only one I'm really active at).
While I agree having a non-English version helps growing the community (as pointed out in the article it could help a young girl to get started), but I am worrying about fragmentation. Also, SO tends to be pretty strict about the way a post is written - so a little girl who is making a post will either be closed or forced to edit. I don't know - it is as if I want people to take the hard route because it can benefit them in the long run.
I really have a mixed feelings about this too.
Side note:
That probably limits the list of potential candidates to Mandarin, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian...
Hmmm it's Chinese since people write in Chinese characters. Mandarin is a dialectic.