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There is around 8 currently existing sites reached the beta requirements, and from them with the single exception of "Engineering", all of them are non-english proposals, whose start depends on the i18n development of the SE.

Next to that, the Portuguese and the Japanese SO sites are already started,

  • despite that the ja.SO wasn't created by the normal area51 process,
  • the larger Spanish SO is still in beta (although it long filled the requirements)

The last info I've read here about the non-english sites is from 2013, which essentially means for me: "wait, please".

Could I ask a progress about this waiting? Maybe even a time estimation? :-)

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    I am slated to create a "state of localization" meta post to bring everyone up to speed. I've got a few other hot-button issues on my plate at the moment, but I will get that posted as soon as possible. Jan 13, 2015 at 16:18
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    @RobertCartaino Thank you very much! Anyways, the next some thousand people committed to the non-english proposals, will be probably happier if they know, how long it will be yet.
    – peterh
    Jan 14, 2015 at 10:19
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    @RobertCartaino I understand you are all busy with other topics, but it doesn't have to be a book. Would a short one-sentence announcement on the area51 proposals, meta, blog or twitter or dedicated chat room, say, twice a month, be such an overkill? And it would make, for sure, the community happy. It's like the progress bar. We'd like to know that something happens in that matter. And we're curious which languages are going to be honored next :) Jan 16, 2015 at 8:47
  • @RobertCartaino: It's been 2 months. Could you make that meta post please. Maybe just a very short one.
    – juergen d
    Mar 20, 2015 at 10:11
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    @juergend 'Tim Post' has taken the helm of managing our International sites. He is currently working on a roadmap for launching our non-English sites and should be posting something shortly. Mar 20, 2015 at 13:01

1 Answer 1

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We've come a very long way with internationalization in a very short amount of time. This is a process that will continue to evolve well into 2016. Before I go into details about our plans with individual sites, I'd like to describe the process a bit.

  1. We (through a proposal or through company goals) identify a language where Stack Overflow positively needs to exist. Primarily, this is due to native speakers of that language being unlikely to also speak English to the degree of proficiency required for them to comfortably participate on an English site.
  2. We ensure that we can meet any technical challenges that the language presents. Japanese has no spaces or plurals, for instance.
  3. We seek a community manager with a strong developer background. We need someone that can not only speak the language, but also know how to speak to programmers. If you're going to talk to programmers about the way they run their site, you really need some programming chops.
  4. When we're able to find and hire the right individual, we go forward with translating the site, launching a private beta, and getting it ready for the public.

Just in the weeks that I've taken over the project, we've nearly switched from using third-party translation services to completely crowd-sourced translations. We're happy to pay top dollar for translations, but we found that the communities produce better translations than 'professionals', since they know how our software works and have the context needed to do it right. We'd rather ask you to do it from scratch than ask you to fix someone else's mistakes.

My point is, we're getting better at this, we're getting faster at this and we're continuing to refine the way in which we do things. But there are also, unfortunately, technical challenges that we simply can't overcome in any sense of time that coincides with what seems a reasonable amount of time to ask people to wait:

  • We will not be able to support sites other than Stack Overflow in other languages for the foreseeable future. This is a people issue mostly, as in we don't have enough of them, but there are technical challenges as well.

  • We will not be able to support right-to-left languages any time in the foreseeable future, if ever. We would like to, but there's currently no clear path as to how we could.

  • We will not be able to support sites in language where English Proficiency is at or above average for native speakers of that language. It's not that we wouldn't like to launch these sites, I believe they would be of very high quality - it's that the resources are more sorely needed for other languages.

If I haven't made it clear in what I stated above, the reasons that we can't proceed with all of the current proposals boil down to being about us, not you. We would love to launch every one of these proposals, but we need to focus on those that we can put all of our resources behind to make sure they're making the Internet (in that language) a better place.

In the coming week, I'm going to be letting the people behind all pending proposals know if we're going to be able to go forward with them, and to the degree possible, what to expect. Many will unfortunately need to be closed because we simply can't give them the support that they deserve, and it's unfair to continue to elevate people's expectations by leaving them open.

I wish we had known everything that I just shared with you a year, or even two years ago - we didn't have a good plan for localization and it's our fault for not having one. The best I can do now is be as open, communicative, transparent and available as possible, which is what you can expect going forward.

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  • I know this topic is long overdue, but as you mentioned quite a lot of headaches on technical issues, I'd like to ask something I've asked here: What if localizing the site is not an issue, where the community can just use the standard English SO interface, with only non-English content? Wouldn't that something considerable?
    – pltc
    Oct 29, 2021 at 20:31
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    @pltc - I no longer work for Stack Overflow, not sure what to recommend, but I definitely can't help.
    – Tim Post
    Oct 29, 2021 at 23:18

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