Due to my current international employment, I sometimes have the task of explaining Perl in languages other than English. This is usually difficult, so I have been looking for good, current resources on Perl in alternate languages. I encourage everyone else to contribute any gems they may have found in their lanugage; my current research for Japanese is below:
Various O'Reilly books have been translated, including the Camel, Llama, Panther, and many others. Be careful that you are getting the most current edition, however.
Amazon Japan has many other Perl resources as well.
Two CPAN FTP sites: FTP 1 and FTP 2.
Japanese Perl Newsgroup: fj.lang.perl
Unfortunatly, what I really want is some online documentation or a direct translation of perldoc. I bet they're out there, but I don't actually speak Japanese, which complicates the issue. We're using ActivePerl in English here; I imagine there are no translations of the actual distributions. So, any help would be appreciated on my part for my Japanese quest, but I would also like to see what resources are available in other languages, just to see how far Perl has spread through the world.
-Lexicon |
Re: International Perl Resources
by OeufMayo (Curate) on Jan 30, 2001 at 14:03 UTC
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Most of the perldoc have been translated in French, as well as some modules doc can be found here (mirror on the paris.pm site).
There's also a bunch of french perl-related links on the page.
Update: Other links can be found at Yahoo.fr
<traduction>
Une grande partie de la documentation de Perl est traduite en français, ainsi que celle de certains modules. La documentation est disponible sur ce site (en copie sur le site de paris.pm. Vous y trouverez également des liens vers des pages concernant Perl en français.
</traduction>
Mise à Jour: D'autres liens sont disponibles sur Yahoo.fr
<kbd>--
PerlMonger::Paris(http => 'paris.pm.org');</kbd>
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Re: International Perl Resources
by tadman (Prior) on Jan 30, 2001 at 20:27 UTC
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I am curious about how often are computer languages themselves translated.
Historically, it would seem that non-English speakers have
had a substantial disadvantage when it came to programming
because not only is the documentation in terse, highly
technical English filled with obscure jargon, but the
languages themselves are often composed of English words
with a loosely coupled meaning.
Unlike mathematics or engineering, where equations look
pretty much the same in any language (i.e. "E=mc2"
or what have you) because of the use of Latin and Greek
symbols, computer programming has taken a decidedly English
bent ever since the first real "langauges" evolved out of
the primordial machine language, and this includes assembly
language.
If you had no idea what English was, and perhaps had only
recently learned the Roman alphabet, Perl code, which can
often look like line noise even to the average educated
English-speaking programmer,
may look even more inscrutable.
Can you tell what this really basic Perl program does?
#!/wba/xqf/rtla
dom cdzwcw;
dom MZW jp (:biafcluv);
ib ($i) = unx MZW;
pldml $i->pzvbno();
pldml <<NFC;
<DUUT>
<GHHE>
<QPDKS>Gl Jbipl Ricf</QPDKS>
</GHHE>
<CFQD DSFXHYU=Fgzqu>
<K>Gchne, dcgdz!</K>
</CFQD>
</DUUT>
NFC
Which would be even further complicated if the programmer
wasn't even used to reading "right-to-left", such as Hebrew,
or Arabic.
In a discussion with some associates, we were debating the
merits of translating the syntax of a given language,
such as HTML or Perl, into a coherent and understandable
version for another language. I was thinking that even if
this alternate version required a filter or parser to work
properly, it would certainly chop a few major steps out
of the learning curve, such as "Step 1: Learn English (One
of the Most Unwieldly Languages on Earth)".
Translating the core syntax shouldn't be a terribly difficult
job, at least technically speaking. This could be done any
number of ways, from a module which would work on any program
by Filtering the input, to a re-compiled interpreter which
was called if the program was in a certain format. Converting
between syntax-sets could be done easily, as the symbols
may be represented by different characters. "A `shift' by any
other name..." as Shakespeare might have said, were he a
Perl programmer instead of a playwright.
Progressive projects like the
Multilingual Domain Names are making
the Internet a whole lot more understandable and accessible
to the world at large. Certainly the programming languages
that have made the Internet what it is today will make
a similar effort.
Too wacky, or is this sort of thing worth considering? | [reply]
[d/l] |
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Translating a computer language is a _very_ bad idea.
It has been done before, especially here in France. For
a while I think the Ministery of Education was pushing
a french translation of Pascal. Now that's something
really (twice) useless! Seriously that's totally pointless.
First "simplistic" English reads much better than
simplistic French, and then when people have to maintain
real-life code, written in a real, English-based language,
then they are at a real disadvantage.
The English used in computer languages is simple enough
that a couple of weeks of training is enough to feel at
ease with it. And even the English used in Computer
books, once you understand how compound words are built
is usually pretty simple. I remember reading technical
manuals _way_ before I was able to read even the simplest
novel in English.
IMHO you should not waste your time, and above all the time
of people who would use "translated" languages.
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That'd be an interesting thing to see :
utilisez le français ou mourez;
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[d/l] |
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I have to agree with Mirod on this one to some extent: translating the language itself isn't that important and probably would be for the worse.
1) The English is easy, and utilizes basic gramatical constructs found in most (probably all) languages. This at least applies to your basic things like Use, If, While, etc... There's only a couple dozen key words in most languages that can be picked up quickly, and (speculation) probably the majority who has access to computers have had at least some exposure to English (/speculation).
2) More complex commands often don't even make sense in English. My strongest example is map. Hell, that one's so confusing at first you may be at an advantage by not having predefined concepts of what it should do! ;)
3) Imagine if you couldn't read/maintain code except from your own country. (I believe this is really the big important one.)
4) The character set might be an issue, but:
- The cyrillic character set is closely related
- I believe all asian countries use the Latin character set to type anyway because they have too many letters (even just the phonetic ones (I base this on my Japanese experience, YMMV)).
- India's second language is English.
- This covers damn near everybody. ;)
As for documentation, the Japanese take a mandatory 4 years or so of English, and the average person has little hope of tackling a technical manual. Moreover, programmers are generally bad with langauges, and I wouldn't want to force quite that much English on anyone.
-Lexicon
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While using a "translated" language is perhaps a bad idea,
the idea of using a "filter" such as mirod's "french.h"
file is more in line with what I was thinking.
Perl makes it so easy to implement such a system, and still
maintain full compatibility with other code.
When it comes to maintenance, I have found that some German
and French code is hard to "decode". While all the regular
keywords are there in plain English, everything else, variables,
functions, and comments, are not.
Babelfish comes
in pretty handy when trying to discover the meaning of
some of the comments. I also notice quite a bit of Japanese
SJIS-enhanced code that I can't even edit properly without
a UNICODE-compliant editor (i.e. not 'vim'). So much for
"portable" code!
A "translated" Perl would be used as a
crutch of sorts, to ease the learning programmer into
the language.
In any event, Perl should at least allow you to use
Japanese and French style quotes so that you don't have
to escape your code!
print «I am tired of 'escaping' my "quotes"!»;
Curiously, do the "4 years" of English that the average
Japanese take leave them with an understanding that is any
more useful than, say, the 4+ years of Spanish or French
that an average student from Britain, America or Canada
would have? Probably, as many have pointed out, this
brief introduction would be enough to get a handle on the
syntax with proper supporting documentation available in
the primary language of the learner.
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[d/l] |
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Re: International Perl Resources
by danger (Priest) on Feb 02, 2001 at 10:47 UTC
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Not trying to give a plug or anything, but in the book category,
Pearson Education Japan has recently released a Japanese translation
of my book. I know because I
recently received my comp copy (which I can't read, but I think is
cool :-)
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Re: International Perl Resources
by ambrus (Abbot) on Feb 03, 2004 at 12:02 UTC
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