New translation experience

#opensource #webdev #beginners #node

Hello everyone! 🙋🏻‍♀️

Today, my contribution to one of the local projects in my open source class was successfully merged after a few days of review. 🎉

Project 👩🏻‍🏫

The issue I was working on was part of the Telescope project, which is a tool for tracking blogs in orbit around my college's open source involvement. Basically, it collects all latest blogs written by the faculty and students and displays them on a single page.

Issue 👀

This issue was initially created as part of the series during the previous month for Hacktoberfest. It related to the bigger issue which allowed students to add different translations to Telescope's documentation.

At first, I was not sure, but one of the reviewers mentioned that they can review Russian language and as I am trilingual, I decided on work on it. So, I requested the language and was assigned a corresponding issue.

However, during Hacktoberfest, I made enough pull requests and did not have time for this specific issue as I was caught up with my other assignments. So, now, when I finally have a chance, I have decided to go back to it and finish the job, as I personally believe that it is bad to leave dedicated issues behind.

I also checked out the other language translations which I can partially understand such as Ukrainian as a reference to my work. I noticed that some of the pages were different by language and realized that the produced Docusaurus translation page was a little outdated compared to the current overview page. So, I copied the newest version manually and translated it instead.

Translation 🪄

The task was to translate the overview page of the project's documentation.

This translation was more complicated than the previous ones but also more interesting. It required me to deliberately think and research some translation options, as the text contained lots of technical terms, formal wording and literary components. It was especially hard sometimes to choose the right wording, as Russian is a very rich but differently built language, and some of the words either do not have a perfect translation or have too many possible versions which are not exactly same. Also, some of the technical computer science terms either cannot be translated, as they did not exist in the language before, or have ridiculous new translation which no one uses and I did not even know about before doing some research. Additionally, all of my previous translations were smaller in size compared to this one.

Pull request review 🔎

After I was sutisfied my translation, I submitted a pull request. I messaged the reviewer in the pull request through comments, but did not get a reply for a day, so I decided to leave a kind message through the Slack channel with a request to check out the changes whenever possible. I made sure to thank the reviewer afterwards, as the translations are tricky sometimes, especially with Russian, so the suggestions are very valuable.

I received two reviews and multiple suggestions around different possible wordings. I implemented the changes and waited for them to be approved. Later, I saw my pull request being merged.

Conclusion 💡

Now, I know how to translate different technical IT terms into one of the languages I know and how to work with internalization in Docusaurus documentation. Valuable and interesting experience overall.