StackOveflow is doing well in different languages (Russian, Portuguese and Spanish, for example).
There are a large user base among these languages and I can see large room to complete the basic trilogy sites in all these languages, since the company already have people who speaks the language and there's the same scenario that give birth to the three sites.
Not yet.
There are two barriers to accomplishing this. One of them relates to why we'd see value in expanding the trilogy in different languages, and the other relates to our ability to allow those communities to operate relatively autonomously when it comes to the actual upkeep of translations. I'll get into both in detail below, but the good news is that we've definitely solved the first barrier.
If it's just to have a place to migrate questions that don't quite belong on Stack Overflow, then we're not yet ready to have these. New trilogy sites need to be a place where very active and enthused communities come together in order to answer questions about the topic, they can't be a bucket to put stuff in order to preserve the purity of another site.
I definitely feel as if we've hit the point where we can bring a critical mass of power users and system administrators together in order to create thriving sites. And probably not just for power users and sysadmins - I bet a lot of you enjoy cooking, too.
For us to be able to do this, we need to make some very reaching changes into how our translation system works, while making sure that our sites maintain their current level of performance.
Strings actually get 'baked' into builds so that our pages render incredibly fast. Part of the original decision not to localize was to eschew complexity that would have made reaching our level of performance incredibly difficult. This is still a very big concern when it comes to how we continue to develop our localization strategy.
Things change here at a very rapid pace. Every month there are hundreds of minor string changes that can result in all international sites reverting to English until someone manages to re-translate the strings, which often means finding them on the site so that they know which items in Transifex they should hit. Sometimes you just have to look through the source code to find something.
Fixing this one thing is like pulling at a thread on a sweater, but the thread never really ends, the sweater just keeps unraveling. It's going to be quite a bit of time before we've got more elegant solutions to this, and then we'd have to make sure that it would be easy enough for moderators to handle without our help. We're talking months of development time.
The priority right now for our localized sites is (firstly) growth. They're growing at a very appreciable and steady rate and we want to do better than just maintain it, we want to try to double it.
The second major priority is getting our translation system to the point where we're comfortable turning on documentation on those sites, which is in-progress, but going a bit slow since we're doing quite a few things at once.
I can't tell you how delighted I would feel to finally have the privilege to announce that we're making the trilogy (and Stack Exchange in general) available to the languages that we currently support.
I can't tell you how absolutely amazing it would be to witness the trilogy, and the network in general, come to life and grow just like it did half a decade ago. And we'd get to see that happen in four different universes concurrently (one for each language we support) - wow.
I can't unfortunately tell you when that day will come, or quite frankly if it will come while I'm still directing the international build out. But as I envision the success of the project - that's a big part of it. I want developers in all languages to have a safe place to explore everything that interests them.
I wish I could give you more definitive dates, or even estimates - I simply can't see that far ahead. But, it's definitely a goal. While the answer technically remains not yet, for all intents and purposes particularly when it comes to setting people's expectations reasonably, the answer is unfortunately no.
