Proposal: JuliaCN translation program (English -> Chinese) and call for ideas

JohnnyChen94
Thu, 10 Nov 2022 16:43:47 +0000
Community

I want to propose a long-term English-to-Chinese translation program to cover anything that is stable and useful to Chinese Julia users.

The Chinese version can be found at Julia 技术翻译计划 —— 征集与赞助 - 中文文档 - Julia中文社区

A lot of parts of Julia have been stabilized since Julia 1.0, and there exist so many good resources explaining Julia and its best practice. However, for the Chinese community (JuliaCN), most users still have difficulties reading English docs and hardly use Julia well, yet we don’t have many good Chinese resources except for the translated version of the official Julia documentation (Julia 中文文档). This introduces a significant experience gap between users who read English and who don’t, and I want to reduce the gap so that more people in JuliaCN can enjoy Julia.

The mechanism

The mechanism is to ensure that one doesn’t need to do everything throughout the entire program: one can propose an idea, donate, or translate but not all of them. Because the translation is usually tedious (yet important) work, I don’t want this program supported purely by love. Yes, we’re doing non-profit open-source work, but I now realize love itself hardly gets an ecosystem-wide impact after 4 years of contribution to Julia, JuliaImages, and JuliaCN.

Here’s the idea:

anyone can propose an idea of what good resources can be translated into Chinese

anyone can donate to raise the stipend for a specific translation project

anyone can take the project (work alone or co-work with others), and when they finish it, they get the stipend

the final output is shared in the public domain. Unless specified, it uses the CC BY-NC-SA.

Many developers in the community are too busy to do the translation work, yet they know a lot of good resources. Many students and learners have the time to do the translation, yet few of them want to spend the time doing the tedious translation for free. Many users have well-paid jobs or incomes, yet they are usually more focused on their own businesses. Thus I propose the above idea to try to unite people together to make this program last as long as possible.

Rules

I’ve created a shared sheet 腾讯文档 for this very purpose, and here’s the rule to use it:

anyone can fill out the sheet to propose an idea

anyone can donate any amount of money to any project – the more stipend a project has, the higher probability it gets done quickly.

anyone can become a translator, or collaborate with other translators for a large project

I can serve as a proxy if anyone wants to keep anonymity

donators and translators need to reach me to update the project status

How to donate/pay

1. one can declare the amount of donation (RMB only)

2. when a project is taken by some translator, I’ll reach both the donator and translator(s) to double-check

3. pays when the project finishes

Of course, if one only wants to support this program and trusts us that the donation will be spent on the most wanted projects, he can donate any amount of money for specified or unspecified usage, and we will handle the rest (in public, of course).

People can reach me or any active JuliaCN members (@Roger-luo, @1115, @findmyway) to donate. We’re about to launch the donation page with the help of 集智俱乐部, an umbrella organization for JuliaCN just like NumFocus.

If you can directly participate in this program, just reach me! We just finished the Pkg.jl documentation under this, I believe this program will work quite well in the long run.

If you don’t read Chinese and want to share ideas about good resource candidates, please just comment in this thread! I’ll update the sheet accordingly.

Reach me at johnnychen94@hotmail.com. More about me can be found on GitHub: @johnnychen94.

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