5

Proposal: Arabic Language

لقد تصقحت الشبكة ستاك اكستشانج هذه و رايت انه هناك حوالي مئة موقع لكن سبحان الله كلها تدعم اللغة الانجليزي فقط. فما سبب عدم دعم شبكة ستاك للغة العربية؟ من مشكلات عدم وجود أي دعم للعربية مشكلة الكتابة، فالنصوص تظهر من اليسار إلى اليمين وليس بالعكس فأسأل من ستاك اكستشانج أن يعطوا الدعم المحتاج


Why all StackExchange site english only?!!! Why there no support for Arabic?!!! many big problem for us!!! arabic is write in rtl, why no support for that? please StackExchange give us support for arabic so no more problem!!!

2
  • 1
    Because it's only a proposal and it's not sure it'll run at all. Once there will be 100% commitment, I think SE team will implement RTL as well. As opposite to starting a proposal IN foreign language, this should take less as "6 to 8 weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeks" Commented May 15, 2014 at 14:59
  • 2
    @Łukasz웃Lツ are you SE team? also give translate for like help center of new beta site? rtl is one big problem, but there are other big problem, like English only so only som understand. also why -2?
    – user107161
    Commented May 20, 2014 at 17:12

3 Answers 3

9

Stack Exchange started out in English only. But now they are working on support for other languages. It is taking a long time.

At the moment, there is only a single site with an interface that isn't in English: Portuguese Stack Overflow. The interface is in Portuguese only. Stack Exchange is currently working on other single-language sites (I believe that Japanese Stack Overflow is next).

You can certainly use Arabic in messages. This happens often on Islam Stack Exchange.

Non-Latin characters are supported in tags (though there are still a few bugs; I don't know if it would work for Arabic right now).

The missing step that we're impatiently waiting for is to allow users to choose their interface language. All the sites about languages other than English currently allow questions in either that language or English, but having an interface in English only is limiting.

3

I think the reason why all sites are in English is because English is the language that most of the people are understanding. You could open this question for any other language in the world and it would always be the same answer.

You can not support more languages than one, because if you would do so, people would ask Questions in many different languages and the idea of the stackexchange networks would get lost.


Example:

Imagine you are asking about something specific in Arabic for example about Computer Networking and none of the Arabic guys knows the answer, but someone from New York knows it, but he cant tell you the solution because... Well he does not know what you are asking.


But I totally get your point and could imagine a possible solution, which would look like this:

Step 1: The stackexchange buttons and links get translated in lets say the 10 most spoken languages in the world.

Step 2:

There must be a new Create Question Dialogue, where you can choose in which language(s) you are asking.

Step 3:

So lets say you have chosen Arabic, then you write down your Question.

The people who have chosen Arabic in there preferences will see your question and can answer it (or not)

If you have chosen 2 languages, for example Arabic and French, then only the people who have chosen Arabic or French in there preferences will see it and will answer it (or not).

Once you got the answer, you accept and the French and the Arabic Question are marked as accepted.


I see many downsides for that concept and it would need to be improved a lot, right now I am lacking in time and cant work out a better concept yet but maybe someone else got more thoughts on that.

2
  • This is not how it works. I'd say, unfortunatelly. Running proposal in other language (as opposed to running proposal about other language) is a "political" thing. Commented May 15, 2014 at 14:58
  • “English is the language that most of the people are understanding” — that isn't true if you're talking about people who are interested in the Arabic language, which is what this thread is about. Stack Exchange doesn't work the way you propose for multiple languages: automatic translation doesn't work (maybe in another 100 years it will), manual translation doesn't work (not enough volunteers), and mixing languages on the same site doesn't work well (how do you build a community of people who don't understand each other?), so instead the path is with separate sites for each language. Commented May 21, 2014 at 9:05
-1

The Arabic Language will be English-language proposal, because it's proposed as so. There are many "XXX Language" proposals (German, Chinese, Russian etc.) and on all of those are the same rules: Meta is in English, tags are in English, interface is in English and questions are allowed in both XXX and English.

RTL support would be tricky, because there's a single text area for text, and both English and Arabic would be allowed on the same time... It would require some special feature to implement, but there are many special features for math and chemistry formula, so once SE team will decide to launch the site, they will probably find something out...

It is possible to launch a site with the interface in foreign language, but there are many pending proposals as for now, and only one was launched after a few years: StackOverflow in Portugese. I'm looking forward to SE sites in other languages, but SE team has announced that they need to make some extra investment like hiring a community manager, so it's not very likely that every foreign-language proposal with 100% commitment will be launched.

Disclaimer: I'm not from SE team. I'm just observing the development of "SE i18n" for a long time...

1
  • 3
    All the language sites are bilingual, allowing posts in either the language of study or English. Tags vary: French and Russian have tags in that language (plus English synonyms), Chinese and Japanese have tags in English, I don't remember the rest offhand. On French, Meta tends to be in English for topics involving the SE engine, and in French for community debates (we try to provide translations for important stuff). Commented May 21, 2014 at 9:02

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .