[Python-Dev] Translated Python documentation

[Nick Coghlan]

On 25 February 2017 at 04:54, MRAB <python at mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote:

> On 2017-02-24 15:10, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>> [snip]
>
> Would it be easier to make a translation into Esperanto, which is meant to
> be easier to learn than English?


Not really, as there are two main criteria for building a successful
translation community:

- potential audience for the translation (i.e. native speakers of the
target language)
- an interested pool of bilingual speakers to do the translation

Those numbers are far more favourable for native language translations to
widely spoken languages like Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and
French than they are for Esperanto.

When it comes to the idea of creating a Simple English translation of the
standard tutorial, my experience is that what folks are more inclined to do
on that front is to just write a new tutorial of their own specifically
targeting the audience they care about, rather than translating the
standard one.

That provides a lot more freedom to not only adjust the specific words
used, but also decide when and how to introduce different concepts based on
their particular target audience (e.g. teaching Python to a group of
mid-career scientific researchers or a group of professional engineers is
very different from teaching it to a classroom full of 6 year olds, or
students pursuing a computing degree at university, which in turn are very
different from teaching groups of interested people that have designed to
sacrifice their own time to attend a community run introduction to
programming workshop).

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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