Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Translate Perl Tutorials to Ronglish

+Gabor Szabo, the editor of +Perl Weekly and the author of +Perl Maven had a great idea to translate good Perl tutorials in as many other languages as possible. We already have three Perl articles translated in Romanian

This as a great opportunity for you to learn +Perl  by translating (if you don't already know). If, on the other side, you already know +Perl you have the opportunity to give back to the community. For me it's great feeling to know that I can contribute back, I highly recommend you to try it.

Native language vs English

We know it is best to learn programming in English, but there are some categories of people who are not very proficient at English and find it difficult to understand it: kids, for example.

Translating to full native language is not beneficial either. Imagine you'd translate the string into Romanian's coarda. I'm sure some sensible folks would find that insulting. In addition, getting people used to technical programming terms in English will make it easier for them to understand tutorials later. All of the above are justifications to officialize and use the famous Ronglish language as a target translation: glue phrases into Romanian, while technical terms kept in English.

Spreading the word about Perl

The most important plus regarding translation is the opportunity to get +Perl close to developers.
From what I saw until now, people tend to see us, the Perl developers, as some kind of mysterious creatures, everybody knows that we exist, but nobody knows  any of us.
They are right: we call ourselves mongers, monks, one of our logos is a velociraptor, our frameworks promote unicorns and rainbows.
For me personally this is flattering, it makes me feel a special kind of developer. I want others to try this feeling too - it is much more easy than one might think.

Do it!!

Enough talk. To get started translated, go to the Github Repository of Perl5Maven and read the instructions. You'll also find there the way +Gabor will promote the translated articles.

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