On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 1:37 PM, Joachim Durchholz <j...@durchholz.org> wrote:
> Am 23.11.2011 20:08, schrieb Aaron Meurer:
>>
>> I see what you mean. To degree do you think people who do not speak
>> English at all will use it if only the tutorial is translated (i.e.,
>> the rest of the documentation is not)? We would have to have tons of
>> volunteers to translate *everything* and keep it translated,
>
> GNU gettext helps with that.
> Typical gettext tools will be able to cross-reference old with new English
> texts and present you with the best matching translation for the old text,
> allowing you to keep or adapt it.
>
>> and even
>>
>> then, names in the code are in English, and Python is in English.
>
> Function names cannot be translated, nor can keywords.
> However, docstrings and message texts can, and it's useful. ("Sine" and
> "cosine" are Latin words, and you learned them when you learned math...
> people expect to learn new words for mathematical functions. As long as the
> can read the text that explains what they are.)
>
> That said, translating Sympy would still be a lot of work, and it would add
> a maintenance burden.
>
> On the plus side, if the English messages go out of sync with the
> translation, gettext will simply fall back to English where it does not find
> a translated string.
I myself have always prefer to read and later also write everything
(code+documentation) in English as then I don't need to maintain any
translations and it works for everyone.
But I think there is a high value in having things translated. The
target audience is not me. But I remember when I was about 13 or 12, I
was able to read manuals, mostly, but it was hard. And having things
in Czech would help a lot, or help me realize that there is a Czech
community around the software and I am not stuck with foreign people
in a foreign language. I view it as an outreach.
Given our manpower, I would definitely not translate docstrings and
code, nor even any documentation. But a tutorial, I think that's a
good idea. Web pages, probably as well. We'll see how it goes, and if
we can reasonably manage it.
Jo, would would be a good mechanism to keep the English and translated
tutorials in sync? Should we add a hash into the translated tutorial,
so that we know which exact version was translated? Obviously we will
be updating things in the English part, and then we can just run git
diff (even post a link at github to do it for us) at each translated
page, so that the user can easily check, if it is in sync, or out of
sync and what exact changes are not translated. I think that will work
great.
Ondrej
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