This is fantastic! Congrats to Stack Overflow and here's to more languages in the future.
We were shocked and delighted when our international user community had massive enthusiasm for translating our app into different languages, and now it's live in Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Greek, Vietnamese, Bahasa Indonian, Dutch and several other languages, with more like Telegu, Malayalam, and Japanese in the pipeline. It's opened up whole worlds of users who otherwise wouldn't have ever had access to the tool.
As some other commenters have noted, there is definitely a social inclusion aspect to releasing in various languages - not everyone has the same access to education around the world. Furthermore, we'll have a much richer community and society if we open communication to everyone and don't expect everyone to learn English, which is a more or less arbitrary standard. We've also recently released a feature where you can translate comments in the app instantly, meaning people who speak different languages can communicate in the same conversation! It's so cool to see.
We've had a great time using Transifex and I can recommend it to any software project hoping to support a translation community. For us as an open source project, we have been very grateful that all our translation has been done by volunteers, and Transifex makes it really easy to coordinate with them. If any other projects are interested in how we manage translation on a technical level, we wrote a blog post about it [0] and will be publishing another, more in-depth one, shortly.
We were shocked and delighted when our international user community had massive enthusiasm for translating our app into different languages, and now it's live in Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Greek, Vietnamese, Bahasa Indonian, Dutch and several other languages, with more like Telegu, Malayalam, and Japanese in the pipeline. It's opened up whole worlds of users who otherwise wouldn't have ever had access to the tool.
As some other commenters have noted, there is definitely a social inclusion aspect to releasing in various languages - not everyone has the same access to education around the world. Furthermore, we'll have a much richer community and society if we open communication to everyone and don't expect everyone to learn English, which is a more or less arbitrary standard. We've also recently released a feature where you can translate comments in the app instantly, meaning people who speak different languages can communicate in the same conversation! It's so cool to see.
We've had a great time using Transifex and I can recommend it to any software project hoping to support a translation community. For us as an open source project, we have been very grateful that all our translation has been done by volunteers, and Transifex makes it really easy to coordinate with them. If any other projects are interested in how we manage translation on a technical level, we wrote a blog post about it [0] and will be publishing another, more in-depth one, shortly.
[0] http://blog.loomio.org/2013/10/01/translating-loomio-2/