No localization, please. Sure, the languages mentioned came from countries where english is not the main spoken language, but the languages themselves are always in english, and so is everything relating to collaborative software development.
If a user comes to a site that is using her primary language, she will interact with that site using that language. That is very much not desirable at a site like Github.
Other than that, the suggestions listed sound nice to me.
English is a de-facto standard for programming - languages, docs, most of the tools are in English. Books come out in English long before being translated.
This will not change any soon, and (I know it's controversial) but for the good of the devs-to-be, let GitHub remain non-localized.
I always feel the chill when someone pastes a non-English screenshot in places like StackOverflow. Or whenever I want to help some fellow dev in my company who happens to have installed Italian or French version of Firefox/Chrome/etc.!
We received a Chinese-language (not sure if Mandarin or what) to a KDE mailing list the other day. We could see it was relevant to us but there was no translation, nothing at all, none of us could understand the problem.
Eventually someone replied asking for them to re-submit an English description of the issue, hopefully they're able to do so. :-/
If you can't speak english, you can't program for sure. I work with some people who are not very good english speakers. I can see it in their code. Sometimes its a mix of english and their own language. Very bad. NO-HIRE
Last year I worked as a freelancer for a company which sold physical stuff over the Internet (ecommerce). All the code I inherited was procedural PHP written with Swedish comments and variable names.
I speak three languages, Swedish is not one of them. That was an awful summer.
In such cases even if you make it a policy to use only English, it can still bite you - for example, subtle grammar errors in variable names in a large codebase will be maddening for anyone except the original programmer.
Inclined to agree with you about this, but isn't the post talking about localisation only for the github website UI itself .. a separate issue to the language used in comments, commit messages, code, etc. It just brings down a barrier that might be stopping some people using it.
> "If a user comes to a site that is using her primary language, she will interact with that site using that language."
If the website UI is in their native language, people would most likely also make the READMEs, issues, comments and other things in their native languages. Commit messages might also be affected, since the user would perhaps not give it much thought that they are using their native language...
I have several non-english projects on Github and (although I am proficient enough to read/write basic english) I'd like to see the user interface in my language.
If a user comes to a site that is using her primary language, she will interact with that site using that language. That is very much not desirable at a site like Github.
Other than that, the suggestions listed sound nice to me.