(no title)
intertextuality | 6 years ago
Materials and knowledge about the language leads to more people potentially discovering it. I can far more easily persuade someone to use Rust, if I share the website with them in their native language.
Consider the reality that not every nation is advanced in English like Sweden or other European nations.
Anyway, the old site did have i18n, meaning that they did care about it. Not only did they care about i18n, they also had more niche languages, which is quite rare for an open source project. The alternative is basically saying "just learn English in order to read about Rust and why you may or may not want to use it". I find this unacceptable.
So it's very puzzling to me that the new website entirely ditched i18n–it's incongruous to what I perceive the quality of the rust team is capable of.
AsyncAwait|6 years ago
That works for more 'end-user' facing projects, (GIMP, Mastodon...), but for programming languages not that much. As someone who speaks 3 languages, (including English), let me assure you that (most) non-English programming materials use a very tortured vocabulary in the target language, which actually makes it considerably harder to learn.
Also, prior to me learning English, I've always found it extremely disappointing when the main website of a project was in my language, but then you click on any important link, (like a guide), and it's English only. It was a bigger let down that if a site was English only from the get go and I knew every link it's going to be English. I actually learned English because of this.
As for general info about a new language etc. there are usually dedicated "IT/programmer" community portals with news and some basic tutorials for the new hotness in the target language, which is usually how non-English speakers learn about new tech, not really from the project website, at least in my experience.