Translations

Hello Radovan!

(though I prefer to write the name the very first :D)

First of all, thanks for suggestion. I vaguely remember myself, but it works via github and here is where translations are stored (and where website can fetch them). If you scroll down, the page contains more detailed instructions. Feel free to check them and see whether it may be interesting for you.

https://github.com/CodeAbbey/Translations

Are these translations worth of only for wolrdwide spread launguages?

It's a good question. You can see from user's list that there are usually less people from nations with smaller population (no surprise, of course). However this don't directly affect number of people who read translated pages.

I open analytics and see that for the past 30 days there are:

• 276 pageviews for tasks in Chinese
• 345 pageviews for tasks in Spanish
• 50 pageviews for tasks in Deusch
• 30 pageviews for tasks in Romanian

Also here are 21 users (not pageviews) from Slovakia during this period (some of these could be the same), from at least 6 different regions.

And of course translations make less reason for advanced problems as they are usually solved by users who can read English anyway. That's why most translations are for the first simplest problems.

Thus I can add translations in any language (well, technically, almost any) - but it may not be really worth spending the time on them (except for personal fun and glory) :)

At the same time just writing some small article about the site in some fitting forum or local magazine may appear more benefitial to us. Or inventing tasks, yes.

I shall also answer your other two posts but I need a bit time to think :)

Radovan, Hello!

(yep, Rodion online)

At last I completed :) thanks for these. Originals of them are now here

https://github.com/CodeAbbey/Translations/tree/master/sk

so if anything needs to be improved, one can create pull-request to these files directly.

I put "translated by Radovan Markus" at the bottom of the pages since you posted translations via git and thus history in github itself has me as comitter (as I was copy-pasting them from gist.github to github)

I am not very familiar with github

I guess if you are student in some IT branch, you'll need git and github sooner or later :)

Regretfully it is not the simplest system of the kind. But good news are that usually one need not know everything to use it. So I think in time it will come by and by... There are various text, video and interactive tutorials... :)

P.S. It was quite interesting to browse through texts in Slovak. You know some words look familiar to Russian or Polish (perhaps even more closely) - but surprising moment is that it have so many diacritics! Cool :)

P.P.S. If you are curious, let's check after a month or two the stats for these new pages!

Radovan, Hi!

Well, I followed your advice and changed my "title" at forum. It is also legacy - I thought (when implemented this) that there could be more than one admin some time in future. But it seems site functionality is not advanced enough to comfortably assign such roles, so it should be safe to have named admin :)

Every Czech can understand Slovak language and vice versa due history

Ah, it just striken me that when I was child there was a country Czechoslovakia but I think it later have reorganized :)

I gained knowledge of Russian language in (and becuase of) computer games

Ha-ha, quite interesting intelligence :) I get a bit more familiar to Czech due to playing at Polish web-site (playok.com) - somehow there were many Czech people. And a bit of Polish thanks to some book of Stanislav Lem (he is one of my favorite authors in Sci-fi).

but unfortunately, this project is currently on hold because of school in the first place and some personal lazines in second place

Oh, both of these are familiar to me :) I'm trying to follow the rule like "at least small commit daily" - i.e. perhaps one-two lines of code - this may help keeping the "creative mood". But not sure I always follow it myself...

I don't think that is a good reason not to have all problems translated

Well, translations are good for the site itself, generally. At least they are supposed to improve search rating etc.

The different matter is that, for example, if I know that you can either spend your time on your project - or on translations - I would be very glad if you concentrate on your project :) Just think. Perhaps you are next Einstein or Turing. Of course not a big chance, but it is usually quite pleasing to see people are doing something interesting (so don't forget to boast a bit here when you have something to show) :)

Please consider the option of translating the entire page it could attract more people

If you mean translating the interface of the site at all (menus, titles, instructions etc) - I thought of this, but honestly I suspect it is more difficult that it looks.

With the problems it is ok to have say dozen of most often attempted problems translated - out of 200+. But the interface could not be just "partially" translated. It would look silly and even annoying.

Then it requires heavy (though not extremely complicated) changes in all templates and code files which generate any text. They all should be extended with translation catching snippets, which get substitutions from dedicated language file.

And then, consider "maintainability". If something is added or changed in the interface, it should be translated at once. The more languages we have - the more translations should be added immediately. Even if it is for a couple of words - it is really painful.

And then there are instructions (our "help" pages).

You see this becomes an amount of work a bit too significant for the single maintainer in a spare time - at the same time this is more difficult to delegate to volunteer contributors.

At the same time with translator built-in into the browser it is less important than translation of problem statements...

The last, but not least - if users see the site in their own language, they often prefer writing at forum in their own language too. I think I'd prefer avoid this. English nowadays is a Latin of Computer Science and it is good to inspire learning it :)