Yes and no - but your point is great in general. I think that there are cases where we who are fluent in English just overestimate the English skills of some people and countries.
While internationalization is not always preferable, as you point out, there are times where it means making a service or tool accessible to people who otherwise would not have access to it. We already know how dreadful the GitHub interface can be to newbies, not to mention the English language itself.
GitHub is such an important tool to developers and entrepreneurs that we should think very carefully about barring other people from using it inadvertently.
Internationalization will have adverse effects, definitely, but I still think the discussion of whether making GitHub English-only is worth deterring people who may not otherwise find their way into software development, programming, and the like. Just think of the many other ways people are starting to use GitHub.
But I for one dread the day I receive unsolicited Pull Requests in Russian for an undiscovered 0day vulnerability. :)
Non-native English speaker here, I volunteer at several companies to translate their interfaces.
Almost all people can read basic English (especially those who access Github), so translating the Github interface seems rather pointless to me. Of course, translating the support articles would really help accessibility for those who don't know English as well as native speakers.
Translating interfaces makes people think they can use their language to communicate on a site. Translating only the support articles helps people understand the site, but they will quickly realize that the site itself prefers English-only communication.
The bar to entry to newcomers is probably more of a UX/usability problem than one of internationalization; that I agree with you on.
Translating the support docs is one suggestion I think is unequivocally good, and something that should be done.
I think internationalization is great in a read-only capacity, but when non-English speakers start posting Issues, comments and Pull Requests, that's where it starts to turn into a problem.
GitHub has very little to translate in the first place, as it's very sparse on prose, so aside from the question of support docs, we are probably making mountain out of mole hills, since the remaining English is jargon and not beholden to internationalization concerns.
While internationalization is not always preferable, as you point out, there are times where it means making a service or tool accessible to people who otherwise would not have access to it. We already know how dreadful the GitHub interface can be to newbies, not to mention the English language itself.
GitHub is such an important tool to developers and entrepreneurs that we should think very carefully about barring other people from using it inadvertently.
Internationalization will have adverse effects, definitely, but I still think the discussion of whether making GitHub English-only is worth deterring people who may not otherwise find their way into software development, programming, and the like. Just think of the many other ways people are starting to use GitHub.
But I for one dread the day I receive unsolicited Pull Requests in Russian for an undiscovered 0day vulnerability. :)