OSDev.org

Hi, I'm new in this forum, and I have a question.
Is it possible to create a Spanish wiki or translate the englsih one?
Thank you

ZaaaZRafael wrote:Hi, I'm new in this forum, and I have a question.
Is it possible to create a Spanish wiki or translate the englsih one?
Thank you

The OSDev.org wiki is English, there is a link to a German or "Deutsch" Wiki.. but I have no idea if that's just a translation effort, or an entirely different Wiki.

In the past the consensus was that translating the Wiki wouldn't be very practical, as it would be almost impossible to verify if translations were accurate or being updated.

A good grasp of the English language is a prerequisite for a technical resource like a Wiki, because the official documentation is guaranteed to be primarily in English as well.

I oppose this because the result would likely be low quality. It effectively doubles the effort maintaining the wiki and the translated pages will always lag behind the English ones. I also doubt the target audience is that big.

Feel free to prove me wrong - but I doubt it's worth going multilingual, the osdev world just isn't big enough. On the other hand, if the lack of translated wiki pages actually deters osdevers, that might be a good reason to start translating.

Why do you believe it's a good idea? What advantages do you see that I don't?

As a German who knows the Lowlevel-Wiki (the one that is being linked by the "Deutsch" links on the wiki), I have to tell that it basically sucks. I tried to get an account there half a year ago. You have to join their IRC channel and ask politely for an account, which will be created "soon" (in theory). I haven't got one by this exact day. Anyways, it's missing information and not even close to the OSdev.org one.

@ZaaaZRafael: You're free to do it, but interest will be extremely small. We have 9316 (OSdev.org figure at 23:30 CET, 2014-12-28) registered users on the forums. About 74 per cent don't have more than 3 posts. Out of the 2428 people who have more than 3 posts, how many do speak spanish? A quick Google search gives me the following numbers: there are about 610 million living humans speaking spanish (Wikipedia estimate) out of a total of about 7.2 billion world population (United Nation estimate). That's only about 8.5%. This means that there are about 205 users that have written more than 3 posts and speak spanish fluently enough to understand it (assuming equal distribution of OSdevers around the world). Some accounts here are about 10 years old. How many of these about 205 users have been active in the last 4 weeks (unfortunately, I can't figure that out, maybe a mod can help). Let's assume 10%. this means that there are about 20 users who would be able to use and contribute to such a wiki. How many will help you? Probably not all. As you should see by now, the target audience is pretty small.

You guys (the ones who speak spanish) could prove me wrong, but that's rather unlikely.

EDIT: tiny grammar fix

sortie wrote:It effectively doubles the effort maintaining the wiki and the translated pages will always lag behind the English ones. I also doubt the target audience is that big.
...
Why do you believe it's a good idea? What advantages do you see that I don't?

I always thought that the point of a Wiki was that it was maintained by the users. So, if the OP is willing to translate all, or part, of the Wiki into another language, why not? Good luck to them.

I'm Costa Rican, thus my primary language is Spanish. In my opinion, wikis are really difficult to mantain. As an example, I'll use the largest wiki worldwide: Wikipedia. Articles in other languages apart from English are usually outdated, mistranslated (Google Translator?), and/or of highly bad quality. Sometimes, I even prefer the English Wikipedia over my native language's! I could spend dome of my free time translatimg articles, but I don't think that would go anywhere. Most "bad-English" speakers onhere are Asians, and usually they also are in the <=3 posts category.

iansjack wrote:

sortie wrote:It effectively doubles the effort maintaining the wiki and the translated pages will always lag behind the English ones. I also doubt the target audience is that big.
...
Why do you believe it's a good idea? What advantages do you see that I don't?

I always thought that the point of a Wiki was that it was maintained by the users. So, if the OP is willing to translate all, or part, of the Wiki into another language, why not? Good luck to them.

I agree. But I'm also a fan of following things through. I'm kinda okay with it if someone volunteers and commits to completing the task and maintaining it. But, if that person will just badly translate a few pagers that quickly get out of date, that's bad then.

Also, what's the advantage of such a wiki? If you struggle with understanding English, you shouldn't be programming. A translated out-of-date wiki mostly leads to misinformation and German/Spanish/whatever-language-in comments and naming in code, which is completely retarded. Example: in German High Schools you're taught Java. Despite having chosen one of the worst possible languages to begin with, they force us to name things in German (noone says something about comments as teachers are not supposed to talk about that topic, they alse think that comments can be omitted). Figuring out what that code does was pretty hard when my American exchange student came to Germany, even though he had a general idea about Java. A Spanish wiki would make people OSdev that don't speak English, with the consequences described above.

I think the best advice you can give to people who aren't comfortable with English is to use Google (mis)translate or similar. I know it's not very good, but I guess it shouldn't be difficult to make out the meaning of it's translation if you know your language well (which you should).

A person made an exact request quite some time ago: http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=26982 (and someone also made a similar request earlier as gravaera's post points out in the above link)

Bender wrote:I think the best advice you can give to people who aren't comfortable with English is to use Google (mis)translate or similar. I know it's not very good, but I guess it shouldn't be difficult to make out the meaning of it's translation if you know your language well (which you should).

And tell me, what happens when you use Google's Mistranslator to talk to another one? Do you notice when newcommers in this forum (i really suspect they're mostly Asians) either use the syntatical order of their native language to speak English or use Google's Mistranslator? I've seen it takes about 3-5 posts from the first one to the real objective to be understood. Anyway, not even native speakers are perfect translators. You can even see some Spanish syntatic sugar on this same paragraph !

KemyLand wrote:Most "bad-English" speakers onhere are Asians, and usually they also are in the <=3 posts category.

There are a few guys from the former USSR, including myself. We tend to speak pretty bad English (just as any other foreign language) because of the long and continuing linguistic isolation of the majority of the population. You could see how bad my English was prior to 2000, just look up my posts on google groups.

KemyLand wrote:Do you notice when newcommers in this forum (i really suspect they're mostly Asians) either use the syntatical order of their native language to speak English or use Google's Mistranslator?

Isn't that obvious? If you don't know the language, you don't know the language. But you do know your mother tongue. So, unless you question each and every construct to see whether it's valid and proper in the target language and carries the intended meaning, you're gonna carry over bits of your native language (unless, of course, you start doing things at random, which is unlikely to improve chances of getting it right).

KemyLand wrote:I've seen it takes about 3-5 posts from the first one to the real objective to be understood.

I had this very problem in 1998 or so. In the end what helped was:
- reading lots of English and deconstructing and analyzing the structure to understand what can be understood
- copying/imitating/borrowing words, phrases, grammar, etc from native speakers
- writing lots of posts to make things stick in my mind

KemyLand wrote:Anyway, not even native speakers are perfect translators. You can even see some Spanish syntatic sugar on this same paragraph !

What's worse, many can't escribir in their native idiomas or don't have a feeling of what's bueno and what's malo. I happen to be working on an English to Russian translation of a book and some of the translations I got to proofread/correct/etc (it's a large collaborative project with many people doing their individual and relatively small parts) were extremely poor. I must also say that the original author was quite lax detail-wise and language-wise and would benefit from another round of proofreading and correction as well. So, I end up correcting and extending both the original and the translation.

"KemyLand"]Anyway, not even native speakers are perfect translators. You can even see some Spanish syntatic sugar on this same paragraph ![/quote]

What's worse, many can't escribir in their native idiomas or don't have a feeling of what's bueno and what's malo. [/quote]

! We tener que put that en the foro rules .

KemyLand wrote:

alexfru wrote: What's worse, many can't escribir in their native idiomas or don't have a feeling of what's bueno and what's malo.

! We tener que put that en the foro rules .

Pues, no lo entiendo. What's el nuevo rule?

alexfru wrote:

KemyLand wrote:

alexfru wrote: What's worse, many can't escribir in their native idiomas or don't have a feeling of what's bueno and what's malo.

! We tener que put that en the foro rules .

Pues, no lo entiendo. What's el nuevo rule?

El nuevo rule es entender your language at menos .