I recently interviewed Luis Lavena (a Ruby hacker from Argentina), during that interview he talked about the lack of Ruby information in Spanish and what a problem that was for Spanish speaking Ruby hackers. I suffered through 'Japanese Ruby envy' when I first started working with Ruby, and I know that the same situation exists in other languages today.
As the interview progressed, I felt a growing urge to do something about the lack of materials in other languages. Now, I understand enough Spanish to muddle through some simple text and speak enough German to be able to get around Germany without too much trouble, but I'm not a translator. I do know people who can translate though. Thus an idea was born.
Starting with my interview with Luis, I'm going to try to get translations of as much of my writing as I can. Luis and his friend Pedro Visintin will be helping with Spanish. Andreas Wolff will be working on German translations. Ladislav Martincik has volunteered to try translating into Czech (starting after this interview). I'd love to see other bloggers/authors and translators join us. If you're interested, send an email to pat dot eyler at gmail dot com and let me know. I'll try to coordinate things.
By the way, You can read my interview with Luis at:
- O'Reilly (in English)
- www.rubyblog.de (auf Deutsch)
- blogs.onrails.com.ar (en Espanol)
Check out http://www.tabernadelturco.com/
ReplyDeleteI don't speak or read much Spanish, but there seems to be a lot of Rails discussion on this blog from Spain. I found it because about half my blog's traffic comes through it. Just confirms how much interest there is in Rails from Spanish speakers.
Actually we in "La Cara Oscura del Desarrollo de Software" have been writing as much as we can in Spanish, and I am developing a "Ruby Photo Tour" that you can check (if you want) at http://www.lacaraoscura.com/2006/05/10/ruby-un-tour-fotografico/
ReplyDeleteI would like to translate it to english, but mine is not that good :-(
Great Idea!
ReplyDeleteI have just seen a statistics on the languages in the European Union http://hvg.hu/hvgfriss/2006.20/200620HVGFriss129.aspx
(unfortunately in Hungarian) - the diagram says 'Percentage of people in the (potential and present) EU states who speak at least one foreign language) - e.g. Turkey only about 30%, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Hungary only about 40% - i.e. 60% does not even speak english... so I think such a project definitely makes sense to spread the word to the (non-english speaking) masses...