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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

I mean that sounds like one solution - especially if you cannot work with Chinese nationals for reasons. But in the spirit of open source and access to other people's code, an alternative solution would be for Github to integrate with a translation service and translate descriptions.

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> an alternative solution would be for Github to integrate with a translation service and translate descriptions

Please don't do this - plenty of service auto-translate descriptions and they drive me crazy. If the description is in a language I don't speak then at least I know that I can skip it. But if it's auto-translated then I'll click on the repo, only then realize that I don't understand it, go back and try again with the next repo.

The only situation in which I would welcome such a change would be if GitHub translated comments, function names, variable names, READMEs and all documentation (including screenshots and reference guides not hosted on GitHub) AND THEN translated my contributions back from my language to the original one.

Thanks. Autotranslations create a blogspam type experience that cheapens the site or service using presenting the translated text.

> especially if you cannot work with Chinese nationals for reasons

This comes off as inflammatory. It sounds like you're misrepresenting GP's desire to filter out a language they cannot read as a kind of bigotry against the speakers of that language.

That may explain the apparent disapproval from the community.

As for auto-translation, there are plenty of browser extensions and other solutions if people want that.

That's not how it read to me, as bigotry. It read more as, if you work in some sensitive role such as in the government, and you cannot work with Chinese nationals due to that, then the filter makes sense.

I also do agree with the filter itself purely because I ran into the same problem too, lots of Chinese repositories with poor if any English READMEs.

You need to look up the definitions of "cannot" and "Chinese nationals". The first means you don't get a choice. The second is citizenship - not race, ethnicity, or language. How you misread that as choosing not to work with Chinese people is beyond me. Seems like you're the one looking to be inflammatory.

Linkdink, things are a bit more cordial around here than you might be used to from other forums. Mine was just a friendly note to someone who seemed to have incurred the displeasure of the community, fair or not, suggesting why that might be so.

Your comment was not cordial. It was concern trolling.

There’s a need for language filter for another reason: number imbalance. The trending page used to be full of Chinese projects with an absurd number of stars, so no non Chinese project could be featured on the trending page.

At some point I actually tried to read some of these projects and they often were complete garbage (empty repositories or disgusting code) or completely specific to China. The useful projects tended to have an English readme anyway.

This honestly made me realize there’s kind of a fracture in open source between China and the west: Chinese don’t speak English, and the west doesn’t speak Chinese. It’s almost like they have parallel libraries for everything we routinely use. Which makes sense because we rarely provide Chinese documentation on our projects.

Or just right-click and hit "translate to LANGUAGE"?

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