Quora launches in Spanish, its second language

Quora has expanded into its first language outside of English in the hope of increasing the number of users. The question and answer service has launched a Spanish version on both its web and mobile apps. It’s available by invite only, and there is talk about potentially adding more languages in the future.

Although being localized in Spanish, Quora is not translating all the questions and responses to make it more accessible to non-English speaking users. Company CEO Adam D’Angelo explained that it’s essentially launching a new instance of the service, growing organically and slowly. By opening it up to a small group and then more later on, Quora hopes to see content created, just like when the English version first launched years ago.

“If you’re in Spanish, you’re only going to see Spanish questions. But if you’re in English, you’ll only see English questions,” D’Angelo said. “People won’t be answering in Spanish to English questions.” He believes that current automatic translation services provides poor quality that is incompatible with his company’s focus on quality.

Quora will scan your IP address to determine whether to show you the English or Spanish version, but there is a switch that can be toggled giving you manual control over what you see.

“There are actually more native Spanish speakers than there are of English [around the world]. People don’t realize how big of a population is out there,” D’Angelo remarked. “It’s just the first language [we’re going after]. We hope to get to the other major languages over the course of our expansion. Spanish is a very big population we can reach.”

To start, Quora has invited a select group of users who not only have been active on the site, but speak Spanish. Other people given access to this new offering include friends and inbound requests. “Anyone can request an invite, and we will let people in as we begin,” D’Angelo said.