This is a very old discussion on Stack Overflow
It might be a lot of effort to create entirely different language sites, and they do not seem to be viable due to little attention/traffic (not yet, at least not on Stack Overflow).
I guess that the practical thing to do is to provide some way of translation, like some chats in computergames do, and keep the basis in English.
There are people with worse English skills here who have done so already. Youāre definitely eloquent enough and could certainly give it a try!
Itās very much meant as a community project (in a certain way, thatās the whole point; opposed to corporate decisions at that place).
However, that also often means that the community goes against what one as a person thinks is the way to go - as I myself have experienced a couple of times already now.
Sure, but thereās also grammar.
Iām German, we love our language so much that we dub all those American movies; even the TV serieses! However, I know that trying to write C# code in German produces very awkward constructs. I canāt imagine programming languages working well with Polish or Spanish either.
Just for the record, I am well aware of how difficult it can be. I spent two years living somewhere where they donāt speak English! And when you donāt really have a choice but to speak the local languageā¦ you learn. So I did, and having done so has enriched my life greatly. This experience strongly informs my perspective on such matters.
Itās very much meant as a community project (in a certain way, thatās the whole point; opposed to corporate decisions at that place).
However, that also often means that the community goes against what one as a person thinks is the way to go - as I myself have experienced a couple of times already now.
I get it, itās just a community that will be better without me here. Rooting for you guys anyway, keep it going and I hope you make this a great site
but itās not the same. I was specifically speaking about devs with no english skills, and no real way to learn quickly enough for their needs.
Iāll throw my $0.02 in:
I used to play a text-based role-playing game called Cantr II: https://cantr.net/ Itās totally free, and has only a handful of developers (maybe just 1 or 2). But it supports a large number of languages. How? Communities write their own translations. They start of with an English site, and users translate as much as they can. To facilitate translations, the developers minimize hard-coded text.
When foreign-language sites arose, it was a big problem for Stack Exchange. Internationalization āState of the Stackā Stack Exchange were bogged down in (a) translating the sites themselves, and (b) having no members of staff to assist the initial sites. Itās probably worthwhile bearing this in mind if Codidact is aiming for large scalability.
I donāt think we get to decide on what languages people can create content in. Thatās for the communities to decide, and I am sad that a quick back-and-forth here led to hurt and misunderstandings.
The software doesnāt care what language content is in, aside from any special considerations for supporting other character sets ā which we have to deal with anyway, because weāve said localization is a goal.
This instance hasnāt yet set any policies about āgatingā communities, though I think weāre all agreed that we want to be broadly welcoming but keep out things like hate sites. That guidance suggests to me that if a community of $language-speakers want a site in their language, they can have it. At the very least, I donāt think anybody here has the authority to say either ānoā or āyesā today; itās a discussion that hasnāt really happened. Donāt assume ānoā.
All that said, we should think (not for MVP!) about whether we want to support multilingual sites to reduce the silo effects of āprogramming in Englishā vs āprogramming in Spanishā vs āprogramming in Hebrewā etc. Maybe thereās a way to bring them together somehow, even if it means there might be some answers on your question that you donāt understand. Or maybe thatās crazy; I havenāt thought about this for more than two minutes so far. Iām just saying: donāt rule things out, but also letās focus for now on the MVP.
Hey folks, I think weāre missing the main point of this thread.
The question is whether the software should be written from the start to be localizable easily, not whether the Codadict sites should be in English or not. The latter is really not relevant here.
As I understand it, the purpose of the Codadict effort is not only to have a bunch of Q&A sites, but to have software freely available to anyone to host their own sites. The question about localization capability in the software is more about the latter. Does it make sense to design the software so that it can be localized relatively easily by others in the future?
Iām not a web software expert (electrical engineer), but it seems to me that designing in the capability of having any text presented to the user come from some file or database that can be translated is not that hard to do. If that is true, then it seems like the obvious way to proceed.
Point of order: what Olin said. This thread is about whether or not our software should support localization, not whether we should host foreign-language communities or not.
To be clear: weāre not at a stage where weāre able to make a decision on whether hosting foreign-language communities is a viable endeavour for us yet. Thatāll come much later down the line, when we have software and have been hosting our own English network for a while. This thread is simply āshould our software be able toā?
On the question of interface localization, there are several questions to be asked.
First, of course, whether we should have it at all at some point (to which I think the answer is a clear yes).
Second, if it needs to be in MVP. The starting post claimed that it is painful to add it later. However I wonder if that pain really came from not adding it up front, or rather from not considering up front that it eventually will have to be added. That is, do we really need to make the effort to build localization in from the start, or would it suffice that we make sure that the right hooks for localization are there, and that the interface reacts appropriately to strings of varying lengths. And related to it, how much different is the work between supporting localization, and supporting the later addition of localization.
The third question, which will likely only be relevant once we start to actually localize, is which localization framework we will use (assuming we donāt write everything by hand).
The fourth question (which certainly will be relevant only when actually implementing it) is on which level the decision should be made: At the instance level? At the community level (possibly with an instance default)? At the user level (possibly with a community or instance default)?
I think our MVP localization requirement should be: donāt impede localization.
Donāt do anything that will make it hard to do later, but we donāt need to have it for MVP.
Just posting so you donāt worry more than needed, Iām absolutely not hurt at all. The back and forth was clarifying to me anyway to better understand what some future goals the community here has in mind and Iām thankful I could get some answers about it
Designing the software to be localised will be a small amount of overhead at the beginning, and then largely the same time for development going forward as if you were adding hard coded text.
If English text is initially hard coded then to add localisation you not only have to add a system, you also have to go through and reimplement all hard coded text.
I use hard coded text all the time, in small projects, or things that arenāt going to be used for long. But if we intend Codidact to be used for years then I can think of no reason not to build in localisation from the beginning.
The same logic applies to the choice of localisation system - replacing a poor one with a better one will take approximately as much time as replacing hard coded text. So this is an important choice. We should use a proven library and not try to make one from scratch.
What if questions and answers could be community translated? Are there any thoughts on this? It sort of reminds me of community translated subtitles on YouTube.
OK first, as weāre discussing localization here I want to introduce this widely used acronym:
L11N = Localization (L followed by 11 letters, followed by n)
What can I say, programmers are a lazy breed and it gets tedious to write out every time.
Second, let me clarify a slight misconception here:
I wouldnāt expect any impeding of l11n to happen anyway. ASP websites have resource files where you can put all text, and in my experience itās standard to use them even if there is no localization (itās just cleaner). L11n is then not much more work than copying that file and replacing the text with the equivalent translations.
However, the proposal of Fluent in the initial post here is a more complex beast, supporting e.g. correct Polish grammar, where thereās things like different plurals for small vs bigger quantities etc. Thatās why it would be really nice to get an experience report about how much work something like that would be. Because that could be considerably more work, for something that isnāt really a dealbreaker for l11n.
ā¦thatād be l10n you mean there 
Hu, I never noticed thatā¦
Iāve only ever seen L11N, now I see that L10N is also in useā¦ and makes way more sense because itās actually 10 letters in between.
Well, Iāll deal with either 
Continuing the discussion from Please bake in localization from the beginning:
I agree. I observed a similar kind of thing on MSDN, with the German-language site, which I tried to follow for a time. But it had the same issues as you describe.
I like your idea about the OP being able to specify their native language, although perhaps it would be enough if the person would mention it as part of the questionās content? And we would not edit something like that out?
Also, on SO people are not allowed to translate for the OP with the reason that, if the OP canāt formulate a question in English itās questionable whether theyād understand any answer. My opinion is split on that. Iām very aware that sometimes people can read and understand much better than they can formulate a text (or speak or hear) in a foreign language. Sometimes not, however.
How would you propose to handle something like this?
I absolutely disagree with the idea that not being able to express yourself in proper writing means you arenāt able to understand something, specially in writing. I think SE got it wrong there.
Except by Japanese, where the Kanji wins, I find it easier to understand what I read than to write in any of the languages I know, other than Spanish. Come on! Even for native speakers itās easier to read than to write properly!
So my idea of how to deal with it is very simple:
Now, regarding another aspect of localization: I think (I may be wrong) that if menus / buttons / etc in the site are localized (translated) that may indicate to the user that asking their questions in a language other than English is OK, which (by everything said so far) is not. So just to avoid being confusing, Iād have the whole site in English.