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[Python-Dev] Translated Python documentation

Berker Peksağ berker.peksag at gmail.com
Fri Feb 24 07:20:41 EST 2017 
On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 12:01 AM, Victor Stinner
<victor.stinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2017-02-22 19:04 GMT+01:00 Serhiy Storchaka <storchaka at gmail.com>:
>> What percent of lines is changed between bugfix releases? Feature releases?
>>
>> My largest apprehension is that the documentation can be outdated and
>> quickly become degraded if main contributors left it.
>
> If the original text (english) changes, untranslated text is
> displayed, not outdated text.

I think that's much worse than showing the outdated text. I don't see
any point on showing half English and half French text if the reader
can't understand the other half of it.

As someone who have spent a lot of time reviewing and committing
documentation patches, I'm strongly against on marking documentation
translations as official. The Python documentation updates frequently
and it's simply not possible to keep them sync with the official
documentation. See
https://github.com/python/cpython/commits/master/Doc for the commit
history of the official documentation. You can easily compare it with
the translations by looking their GitHub repositories.

Also, there are a lot of better educational materials (e.g. Django
Girls Tutorial) for people who don't speak English and have no
previous programming experience. Even the tutorial contains several
references to different programming concepts and programming languages
such as C++.

--Berker
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