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Lessons in languages other than English #616

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bnwaweru opened this issue Apr 16, 2019 · 39 comments
Open

Lessons in languages other than English #616

bnwaweru opened this issue Apr 16, 2019 · 39 comments

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@bnwaweru
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bnwaweru commented Apr 16, 2019 •
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Has there ever been a consideration to provide the lessons in other languages?
An example of Africa, maybe french for Francophone countries and Swahili?
For most of people from this countries their first language is french or swahili, and i think it would go a long way in aiding of their understanding of the concepts
@maneesha
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Hi @bnwaweru You can read about the work of our Spanish language translation team here and here.

I think @ErinBecker can talk to you more about communities who have been interested in other language translations.

@bnwaweru
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bnwaweru commented Apr 17, 2019 via email

@ErinBecker
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Hi @bnwaweru - My apologies for the delayed response - we've had a holiday weekend here in the US. There have indeed been various conversations about creating language translations for a number of The Carpentries' lessons, and there are now a number of Spanish translations that are supported by community members as active Maintainers. At present, we do not have staff time available for supporting or maintaining language translations, especially given the vast number of languages that have been proposed. However, all of The Carpentries materials are licensed CC-BY and can be used and modified by anyone so long as the original source of the material is referenced. The Spanish translations group has been very successful in coordinating community effort to provide and maintain translations, and may be able to provide some guidelines on their process.

I know that providing our official lessons only in English imposes a barrier to their use in communities where English is not a primary language and therefore a barrier to equitable access as The Carpentries spreads to and grows in these communities. Thank you for raising this issue and keeping the issue of translations at the forefront of conversation in our community.

There has been some discussion of starting a "Translation Task Force" of people from various language communities to discuss the technical barriers in supporting multi-language versioning of our lessons. I would love to see such a group form and provide recommendations around possible solutions to The Carentries staff and Executive Council on how we can best move forward in addressing this accessibility issue. Pinging @raynamharris (who coordinated much of the Spanish translation efforts) - @raynamharris, would you be able to add pings here for anyone you think might be interested in organizing or getting involved with such a task force? I'll also look back through previous conversations on this and add some names here as well. Thank you again @bnwaweru for raising this question!

@ErinBecker
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ErinBecker commented Apr 23, 2019 •
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@ngrafgr - re. Portuguese
@juan-pineda - re. Spanish
@statkclee - re. Korean
@TomKellyGenetics and @peterjc - re. Japanese
@fmichonneau - re. French
@dpshelio - re. Spanish and technical implementation
@rgaiacs - re. Portuguese and technical implementation
@nicoguaro - re. Spanish

Also see:

It would be great to make a master-list of all of the relevant conversations the community has had around translations, particularly around technical issues in translation, and keep those in one location to inform future community discussions. I'll continue to look around for more items to add to this list, but if you know of any that are missing in the list above, please let me know.

@raynamharris
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It does seem like it would be nice to have a group of people dedicated to staying informed about translations and providing guidance and/or standards for translating lessons.

I know a lot of people are passionate about Spanish translations. I'm not sure who would be also interested in being part of the discussion (or potential task force) about lessons translations in general, but people who come to mind are @agbeltran @orchid00 @map0logo @dpshelio @martinolmos @NPalopoli @Helysalgado @flor14

@flor14
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flor14 commented Apr 23, 2019 •
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Thanks Rayna!
Hello! I am planning to contribute with Spanish translations in the following month. It sounds interesting to me being part of a discussion with other instructors about that topic.

@orchid00
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Hi @bnwaweru, another option is automatic google translation. Here is an example https://carpentries-es.github.io/sql-ecology-lesson-es/ the top right corner of the menu is a language selector. This is something we tried a me tested last year, the translation using main languages was rated as good enough. This example was made by berenice, mateuz and I.

@TomKellyGenetics
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Hi everyone, I'm happy to advise based on what we've experienced with Japanese so far. We're very much following in the footsteps of the Spanish team and are grateful for their efforts and advice. There are some Slack/Topicbox channels for localised lessons and for Japanese we also use our own GitHub organisation repo to track our translations. This is open if you want to use it to guide your own translations or give us feedback: https://github.com/swcarpentry-ja/i18n

There is a local-africa group on the TopicBox so it may be good to reach out there to see if anyone will help you. I've heard that there is interest in a French language version of the lessons in Canada as well so it may be possible to co-ordinate that.

It seems that there is a lot of interest in localisation of lessons and building communities in new (non-English speaking) places. Perhaps we should consider making a channel or list specifically to discuss these.

It is also a holiday period in Japan next week after I return from Seoul. I'm happy to answer any questions but I will be taking a break at this time.

@TomKellyGenetics
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@bagustris - re. Bahasa Indonesia

@bnwaweru
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bnwaweru commented Apr 29, 2019 via email

@Helysalgado
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Helysalgado commented Apr 29, 2019 via email

@ErinBecker
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Hi all - it seems like we have quite a bit of momentum here around creating and maintaining lesson translations for communities outside of predominantly English-speaking regions. I like the idea of creating a mailing list or Slack channel (or both) dedicated to growing The Carpentries in non-English speaking areas. Any suggestions for what we should name such a channel?

@TomKellyGenetics
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Hi Erin,

I'd suggest "localisation" or "internationalisation" as we've also had to deal with differences in culture and background knowledge. Especially for Japanese and Korean, I think a direct translation is not always the best approach as learners would invest time in understanding examples that are unfamiliar to them rather than on the core concepts. In Japan "language" and "nationality" are closely associated (although some of our team are based outside of Japan) but I don't think the "local" groups are ideal for this, especially for other languages that are used around the world.

@lauracion
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Hi All,
This is great! I just arrive to this thread through Slack. I've been getting increasingly involved in the Spanish translation and in growing The Carpentries reach in Spanish-speaking countries, too. Happy to join a more general translation taskforce, too. Indeed, I just wrote to Francois asking about how to work in the Spanish The Carpentries without losing ties with "The Carpentries mothership". A translation taskforce would be ideal to unite all translation efforts and to learn from each other. Thank you!

@MathildeMousset
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Hi all,
Thank you @ErinBecker for redirecting me here.
I can help with the translation of some lessons to French, if the Africa team is interested (hi @bnwaweru !).
Since I am new to the Carpentries, I am not sure whether there is something I can really bring to a general translation task force yet, but I think that's a great idea! Many things to think about.

@dpshelio dpshelio mentioned this issue May 10, 2019
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@lauracion
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Unrelated, but I believe this may be of interest to people in this thread: https://discuss.ropensci.org/t/community-call-managing-multilingual-communities/1722

@agbeltran
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This thread is great! It'd be great to coordinate efforts with the different translations, and create a single process/infrastructure to handle updates, etc.

Hi Erin,

I'd suggest "localisation" or "internationalisation" as we've also had to deal with differences in culture and background knowledge. Especially for Japanese and Korean, I think a direct translation is not always the best approach as learners would invest time in understanding examples that are unfamiliar to them rather than on the core concepts. In Japan "language" and "nationality" are closely associated (although some of our team are based outside of Japan) but I don't think the "local" groups are ideal for this, especially for other languages that are used around the world.

+1 for internationalisation

@agbeltran
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And about infrastructure/process, @dpshelio has been experimenting with different options that sound great.

@TomKellyGenetics
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@agbeltran Yes, we've been working with a fork of the internationalisation tools developed by @dpshelio for the Japanese team. We had a bit of confusion getting started but it's working great for a small group of translators. You can see our guides (in English) and progress at the repo below.

Internationalisation: https://github.com/swcarpentry-i18n/i18n
Japanese fork: https://github.com/swcarpentry-ja/i18n

@flor14
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flor14 commented Jun 3, 2019 via email

@ErinBecker
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ErinBecker commented Jul 2, 2019 •
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Hi all - I've just created the Slack channel #internationalisation. If you're not yet on The Carpentries Slack organization, you can join here: https://swc-slack-invite.herokuapp.com/. To join the new channel: https://swcarpentry.slack.com/messages/CL357S0CD'

I haven't yet advertised the new channel anywhere, but please feel free to invite any community members you think may be interested or to send out a Tweet!

@ErinBecker
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There is a lot of community excitement about this, for many of the different languages that our Instructors, learners, and other community members use. Individual lesson translations have been works of passion by community members, and have undoubtedly been used in many individual workshops, but because of the current lack of infrastructure in our lesson stack to support maintenance of multiple languages, it quickly becomes difficult to keep translations in synch with one another. I would love to see an Internationalisation working group come together to identify a path forward for long-term support of multi-language lessons. (e.g. using the framework developed by David Perez-Suarez here: http://dpshelio.github.io/blog/2018/04/15/a-sustainable-way-to-translate-the-carpentries-lessons.html). I can’t provide much help on the technical side, but would be overjoyed to help this group get organized and schedule their first few meetings!

@TomKellyGenetics
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This is timely for us. Progress with the Japanese team has been slow recently but we are meeting soon to discuss how we can make things easier for more people to get involved. I've posted more details on the internationalisation channel. We also have dedicated channels:

https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/curriculum-japanese (English)

https://r-wakalang.slack.com/messages/CEG87QAE5/ (English/Japanese)

@maneesha maneesha mentioned this issue Jul 12, 2019
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@maneesha
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@zkamvar and @fmichonneau Do you want to keep this open?

@maneesha maneesha changed the title lesson language Lessons in languages other than English Apr 16, 2021
@TomKellyGenetics
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To update on this, a workshop in Japanese has been held recently: https://swcarpentry-ja.github.io/2021-04-02-todai-online-en/

Hopefully, more to come. We'll update with a blog post in time.

@maneesha
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maneesha commented Sep 3, 2021

Tagging @fmichonneau @tobyhodges @zkamvar - Do we want to keep this open? Do we have a place where we maintain lists of official/unofficial lesson translations?

@maneesha
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Bump @fmichonneau @tobyhodges @zkamvar - Do we want to keep this open? Do we have a place where we maintain lists of official/unofficial lesson translations?

@tobyhodges
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I believe this is related to the work @acrall is leading with the Community Development Program and establishing a registry of The Carpentries subcommunities. Specifically, I can imagine that the registry of subcommunities will provide us with a way for community members to list efforts being made towards internationalisation of our lessons and other content. Just yesterday I heard from one of our Regional Coordinators about how they are frequently approached with questions about lesson translations, so this is still clearly an area of great interest for our community.

From the perspective of the Curriculum Team, It is our hope that we will secure funding to allow us to dedicate support to the coordination of internationalisation efforts across our community. When we have that funding and can begin that work in earnest, the information in this thread will provide very helpful context.

Finally, I am not aware of a single location where we list internationalisation efforts and/or lessons available in languages other than English. Such a list would undoubtedly be helpful but I would prefer not to devote time to preparing it while The Carpentries website is in the process of redesign/redevelopment. Instead, I would prefer to keep this open for now so that community members can find it, and close it when we have a better resource to provide to people who want to get up-to-speed with the latest internationalisation efforts in the community.

@acrall
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acrall commented Mar 16, 2022

Thanks, @tobyhodges, for tagging me on this. This issue was raised yesterday during the second call for the CDP. Myself, and a couple of community members on that call, plan to pull together a themed community discussion on this very topic. We thought a Community Discusssion might serve as a nice foundation to potentially propose a session or session(s) for CarpentryCon.

@acrall
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acrall commented Apr 18, 2022

I'm tagging others here who I've been communicating with about pulling together a relevant Community Discussion: @joelnitta @annajiat @dpshelio @yabellini @paocorrales @elletjies

@joelnitta
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joelnitta commented May 1, 2022 •
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@acrall Thanks for the call-out.

It's nice to see the interest this thread has generated, but as implied by @tobyhodges' comment above, I think it is clear we need a centralized home for translation efforts and information (not just this issue!).

On a recent community call, @yabellini mentioned that translation should be considered as important as lesson maintenance or development, something that really resonated with me. To that end, I have a few ideas:

  • Make translation a team project
  • Include a section on translation in the handbook (currently it is only referenced within Regional Communities / Carpentries-es); this could be the centralized home to curate information related to translation efforts.
  • Curate a list of translators (perhaps not everyone who has ever contributed a translation, but at least those who are heading up local translation efforts) akin to the lists of maintainers, instructors, etc.
  • Don't consider translation to be a sub-component of the Community Development Program. I think it is closely related (especially because many translation efforts are/will be at the regional community level), but deserves support and status as its own program.

@acrall
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acrall commented May 3, 2022

@joelnitta Thanks for these ideas, I really appreciate the time you have taken to consider how to support these efforts within the community. I will bring this up with the Community Development Team to see how we can support via a team project and/or new program, but I would like to better understand precisely what is needed. I think the Community Discussion and conversations via the #internationalisation channel will support that. I have invited other Core Team members to fill out the poll for scheduling so they can also join the call. I would assume that the team project would result in the content for the handbook and/or initiation of a new program. The Instructor Development Committee, with the leadership of @HaoZeke, developed a plan for providing more avenues to acknowledge volunteer contributions last year. Some of these recommendations require updates to our database system, but I know there are a lot of updates/features that have been requested that are in the pipeline for implementation. I will reach out to the Infrastructure Team to get an update on this as well.

@joelnitta
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@acrall Thanks for facilitating this! My ideas are just starting points; I agree the details need to be hashed out. I look forward to doing so in the #internationalisation channel and Community Discussion. I appreciate you inviting other Core Team members, as this clearly needs support from the Core Team to move forward.

@froggleston
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I'm currently investigating CrowdIn as a solution, given interest from other projects and subcommunities, and hope to have some feedback over the coming weeks.

@maneesha
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@tobyhodges @froggleston I am trying to close out all issues on our current website to prepare to transition to the new site. Do you want to keep this issue open as something to consider on our new website? Is it being addressed elsewhere?

@froggleston
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I think this would be covered in issues that would be raised in sandpaper in future.

@maneesha
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Thanks @froggleston
Can I move this issue to https://github.com/carpentries/sandpaper?

@maneesha
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maneesha commented Nov 4, 2024

@tobyhodges @froggleston
Can we move this issue to sandpaper?

@froggleston
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Hey @maneesha - yes, that's fine.

@maneesha maneesha transferred this issue from carpentries/carpentries.org Nov 4, 2024
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