The rOpenSci Multilingual Project

Pao Corrales

November 21, 2023

Our motivation

Multilingual resources can lower the barrier to access to knowledge, help democratize access to quality resources and increase the possibilities of contributing to software and open science projects.

Meme of Pink and Cerebro that says 'What are we going to do tonight brain Yani? The same thing we do every night, try to translate the internet'

First objectives

  1. Translating the Development Guide (and associated materials) to Spanish.

  2. Building and sharing the related guidelines and tooling.

¿Why Spanish?

  1. We are native Spanish speakers
  2. The Spanish-speaking R community has been actively translating materials in the recent years
  1. rOpenSci was open to receiving contributions in Spanish!

Multilingual publishing of documentation and resources involves two aspects:

  • Internationalization technological solution allowing the software to adapt to different regions without requiring engineering changes to the source code. It is what enables us to localize our content.
  • Localization process of taking a piece of content in its original form and converting it into something more accessible and suitable for another region, country, or audience. Includes language, date formats, currency, measurement units, and support for different character sets.

Technical translations of living documents have two well-defined stages that involve different resources:

  1. achieving a first version of the translated material and,
  2. keeping the material updated and synchronized between the supported languages.

The products (with some spoilers)

  • The Dev Guide in Spanish
  • A glossary: a list of technical terms which will be translated into Spanish and a list of those that will not be
  • Multilingual tools: R packages to improve our workflow for translating technical documents
  • Our experience documented: The Translation Guide
    • A general guide of rules to follow when translating technical documents
    • A technical guide to learn how to use the workflow
    • An Specific guide on how to localize to Spanish