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Ok, I´m new here. My question is simple. I was searching in Area 51 any proposal about create Mathematics in Spanish, like the proposal of create Stack Overflow in Spanish too, anyone know if the proposal has been made? or had been done before and the proposal was not approved?

Edited:

The site has been proposed in Area 51, here is the link to the proposal: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/50091/mathematics-in-spanish

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I wouldn't expect there to be much support for it. SO in other languages exist because SO is a very large community, by two orders of magnitude over Math.SE. There was a related discussion a while ago about asking and answering questions in a language other than English. I personally think that it's reasonable to post native language version and Google-translated version of the question, for the latter to be edited by others as needed. – user53153 Jan 8 at 20:52
Why don't everyone learn english and ask in english? Let's make this world a place where we speak only one languange, it's better this way. – Gustavo Bandeira Jan 18 at 5:12
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@GustavoBandeira isn't that like saying we should only polar coordinates system? – yiyi Jan 20 at 6:02
¡Buena suerte!${}$ – Américo Tavares Jan 23 at 22:25

5 Answers

up vote 12 down vote

At present, only two non-English-StackOverflow proposals reached the necessary number of committed users to enter the beta stage: Turkish and Portuguese. However, they have not yet launched as betas:

This launch is on hold while we add the international features needed to make it functional for this community. Allowing international characters in tags is our first priority before launch. Dates will be announced when available.

As for the Spanish version, after 5 months it has only 104 committed users out of necessary 250. Maybe it will reach beta, maybe not.

When we compare Math.SE and SO, some scaling is required. In terms of the number of users we are less than 1% of SO. In terms of the number of questions we are 2%.

Putting two things together, I conclude: Math.SE in another language would not be a viable proposal.

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up vote 12 down vote

As an alternate suggestion, how about Spanish and French (and possibly other) language tags? That way speakers of those languages can filter for questions in their language, while English speakers can simply filter them out. Everyone wins.

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I agree with Potato – dwarandae Jan 11 at 4:14
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+1: This is a rather inclusive idea. It's worth thinking about, at the very least. Although, there might be some practical difficulties, e.g. closing questions as duplicates. – Douglas S. Stones Jan 11 at 7:39
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@DouglasS.Stones Were this ever to be implemented (and I think it should -- it's practical, easy to implement, and has no downsides), I think questions with the same content but in different languages should both be kept open. If we view the purpose of MSE as providing a useful reference, the version in a non-English language serves a purpose different from the English one, as it targets a different audience. – Potato Jan 11 at 8:42
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+1, As another language tag I suggest the Portuguese one. – Américo Tavares Jan 11 at 19:04
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A potential downside is that some moderators may have to deal with flags on posts/comments that they can't read. – user53153 Jan 12 at 1:53
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@dwarandae: Usually that is a legitimate reason for an involuntary hospitalization in your local sanitarium. But in this case I am going to make an exception... – Asaf Karagila Jan 13 at 18:59
up vote 3 down vote

Apart from being viable or not, I don't see the point in creating a ''Mathematics in Spanish'' (or any other language) site. This is about sharing knowledge, teaching and being taught: the more people can read your messages the better.

Shouldn't we learn english (or any other useful common language) and use it? The important thing is Mathematics. I would agree on a solution of the kind: letting people write in native languages + google translated version so others can completely translate the question/post.

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The lack of proficiency in English prevents some of us to post better worded question and answers, especially the subtle ones resulting in rather terse texts. – Américo Tavares Jan 16 at 23:06
Yes, but the solution of learning English will let you communicate to more people and that's powerful. And if you want to study mathematics you have to learn English, maybe you could do it from French or German but I can tell you there is little biography translated into Spanish. – Zango Lotino Jan 16 at 23:17
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I agree that it allows the communication with more people. An example of the difficulties: many use the imperative ("prove", "solve", etc.) just because it is the standard style of written mathematics but here this is considered rude by many. And in MO the proficiency in English is far more important than here. – Américo Tavares Jan 16 at 23:37
-1, Spanish is common enough (and useful). – Jorge Campos Jan 24 at 18:47
@JorgeCampos: The phrase (not very well worded) does not impies that Spanish is not common or useful, what it tries to say is that when a discipline or activity has a stablished common language ("lingua franca"), to learn that language (at least rudimentally) must practically be regarded as part of learning that discipline. And today, English is the lingua franca of science, as latin was in c.XVII. – leonbloy Jan 24 at 19:02
up vote 2 down vote

Google -and none other- is not capable, as far as i know, to make good translations. This is why the idea of using another very extended language through the world, like Spanish, is good. To get enough and qualified people to attend; it would suffice to make some good publicity in some of the Spanish speaking countries south of Río Grande, in America and also in Spain; in the universities and schools, for instance; by the means may be of the "ministerios de la cultura" of the Spanish speaking countries or by the means of the "Instituto Cervantes" and other similar associations which should be able to understand the importance to promote the use of the Spanish language in the mathematical/scientific field.

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up vote 2 down vote

I am not very fond of the idea. In my experience, most math students ($\ge$ secondary school) know at least a little English, usually quite enough to understand answers here -specially considering that "technical" English has a very simple and short vocabulary. It's true that, as one commenter says, lack of proficiency in writing English can be a barrier to ask questions, but I'd bet that there are lots of members here (as myself) that are willing to make corrections and translations. Non-english speakers would be better served, I think, if they are allowed (and encouraged) to post questions in no-matter-how-bad English (eg, Google translated) or even in their other languages, as long as they can be marked by some special tag or flag, so that other users can help editing them.

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Oh, I like the idea of a something like a (machine translated) tag that which might help encourage grammatical and translation edits, as well as showing that the potentially poor writing is not due to laziness. – Todd Wilcox Jan 24 at 18:06

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