On Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 06:01:59AM -0500, tritium-list@sdamon.com wrote:
My gut splits the difference on this issue; I suggest an approach to meet in the middle – a version of the docs written in simplified English (Not quite Up Goer Five simplified, but simplified.)
As an English speaker, my gut tells me that it would be much harder to write *accurate* simplified English technical documentation than to translate it into another language. You have all the difficulties of translation, plus you're working under a handicap of only using some (ill-defined?) subset of English. Wikipedia offers some evidence supporting my view: - the main English Wikipedia has 5 million articles, written by nearly 140K active users; - the Swedish Wikipedia is almost as big, 3M articles from only 3K active users; - but the Simple English Wikipedia has just 123K articles and 871 active users. That's fewer articles than Esperanto! https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias Nevertheless, I certainly wouldn't object if people wanted to try writing Simple English translations of the docs. But I don't think they would be as useful as translations into non-English. [...]
For any language you want to support other than English, you need a translator who is A: a python expert, B: fluent in English, and C: fluent in the target language.
I disagree. You need a translator who is A: skilled at technical documentation, with B and C as above. They don't need to be a Python expert. We have plenty of Python experts that they can consult with and ask questions. But they need to know the right questions to ask: "Python attributes, they're kind of like C members, right? I would translate 'member' into Klingon as 'gham', which means 'arm or leg', so I can use the same word for attribute."
…And then you need another one to check what was written. These are practical problems. There are extant services to support this, they are expensive in either money or time, and the docs produced usually lag behind English quite a bit.
Is this a good use for some PSF funding? Would companies be willing to invest money in translating Python documentation? Just because we're Open Source, doesn't mean that everything we do has to be purely volunteer. -- Steve