An abandoned experiment - Translating FastAPI documentation to tamil
2023-03-07
It started with an ambitious idea - translate Python documentation to tamil.
The reason I wanted to do this project was:
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English is a language barrier for entering into tech by non-native speakers of the language. I grew up speaking Tamil and one book which accompanied me since I was 8 years old was Oxford English Mini Dictionary. I had a hard copy of it and still continue to have it in my desk.
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There were technical terms, like
ephemeral port,heuristicand without knowing the meaning of these words, I was not able to understand the core concept or what ephemeral ports do. -
There are tech tutorials in youtube in native languages but they lack the depth which is required to develop good software.
I thought let's experiment with a smaller project - converting FastAPI documentation to Tamil and so I took on the project in October 2022. I gave myself an agenda of converting first 3 pages of fastapi documentation to tamil by Oct 31, 2022.
The first weekend of October, I went to Thiruvarur district library where I got a dicitonary of english-tamil translations of technical terms and made a copy of important terms, like framework etc. Then, I started docs translation.
Some of the challenges which I faced were:
- Translation required high bandwidth than I expected.
- Some of the technical terms did not have a good tamil translation.
- The process of typing tamil words in english keypad was very slow. For example, completing a single sentence often took about 5 mins for me.
I realised that I will not able to allocate the required bandwidth for translating the docs due to other commitments and I moved the project to my todo list. Meanwhile, if you are interested in translation, here are some helpers: