Internationalisation

[kariljordan]

Goal 2 of the Carpentries Strategic Plan is to Intentionally incorporate equity, inclusion, and accessibility to support a diverse community. One of the objectives under this goal is: Improve mechanisms for participation and contribution to our community by investigating ways to support more languages, better understanding the needs of signing and non-signing members of the Deaf and hard of hearing community, and enabling more ways to participate that are not dependent on stable internet access.

This issue will track progress on translation efforts across The Carpentries community.

[kariljordan]

In July 2020 The Carpentries announced Glosario, an open source, multilingual glossary of data science terms. Since that blogpost was published, almost 200 more terms have been added to the glossary in English, along with many more definitions in other languages. In the future, the resource will help lesson developers and maintainers make their materials more findable, allow learners to identify paths between lessons, and support non-English speaking learners in grasping lesson material.

In October 2020 the community helped us internationalise and expand Glosario, the open source, multilingual glossary of data science terms, during Hacktoberfest 2020.

[kariljordan]

More conversations on internationalisation are happening on the #internationalisation Slack channel under The Carpentries Slack organisation.

[tobyhodges]

Update from @zkamvar regarding lesson translation: In early testing, the lesson template prototype was found to be easily compatible with existing community-developed translation tools that are actively being used in our community.

[fmichonneau]

We are doing a new community contribution drive to Glosario for Hacktoberfest 2021.

We have a better workflow to communicate with community volunteers interested in translation and internationalization efforts, and we are looking at funding opportunities to better support this work.

[kariljordan]

For reference, here is the announcement for Hacktoberfest: Hacktoberfest 2021 - Glosario Contribution Drive

[elletjies]

Quoting Kari in this blog post in reference to CarpentryConnect South Africa 2021 :

"Goal 2: Intentionally incorporate equity, inclusion, and accessibility to support a diverse community.

Thanks to the generous support from the Code for Science & Society Event Fund, we are able to provide live captioning and translation services to attendees in Kiswahili and isiZulu. Additionally, up to 100 attendees will receive mobile data to attend conference events, like the Data and Library Carpentry workshop, instructor training and networking events."

• Behind the Scenes: What it took to run CarpentryConnect South Africa by Akashidiya Chakraborty, Angela Okune and Angelique Trusler
• Carpentries Connect South Africa 2021 opening and closing keynotes now available in isiXhosa and isiZulu by Angela Okune
• Glosario: African contributions by Angelique Trusler
• Announcing The Carpentries African Capacity Development Manager, Angelique Trusler by Kari L. Jordan
• CarpentryConnect South Africa 2021 in Review by the University of the Western Cape
• CarpentryConnect South Africa 2021 - A global event by Angelique Trusler

[tobyhodges]

Community members have been doing excellent work translating Carpentries lessons into several other lessons, e.g.

• https://github.com/swcarpentry-ja
• https://github.com/joelnitta/dovetail
• https://carpentries-i18n-handbook.readthedocs.io/

(Note: the list above is non-exhaustive.)

However, there are several reasons why we have chosen not to begin supporting translation of lessons from the Core Team yet:

• As past lesson translation efforts have shown, for translations to become a sustainable part of our community’s operations, they need to be supported by technical and human infrastructure that is not overly reliant on the efforts of a small number of volunteers within the community. Establishing the kind of technical and human infrastructure required to support a sustainable subcommunity will require a considerable investment of time from the Curriculum Team.
• Furthermore, our lessons are supplemented by a certain amount of supporting tools and resources: templates, documentation, workshop webpages, etc, that need to be considered as part of the project to internationalise The Carpentries.
• Our current systems and processes for lesson maintenance (a team of Maintainers for a lesson, supported by a Curriculum Advisory Committee) would need to be significantly rethought to enable community members to contribute to lessons in languages other than English, i.e. allow for improvements made to lessons in one language to be propagated to the versions of that lesson in all other languages.
• @zkamvar’s ongoing work to redesign our lesson infrastructure is a very large undertaking (see #9). It was agreed within the Curriculum Team that the initial scope of that project should be limited to exclude the incorporation of translations, in order to limit the size and complexity of the task.

I don’t list the above as reasons to avoid ever supporting internationalisation, but instead to try to explain why we prefer to wait until we are ready to give that project the time and energy it deserves. We want to integrate translations and internationalisation into our curriculum ecosystem. But we also want to make sure we do it properly, in a way that will survive beyond the time when the founding members of that subcommunity have moved onto new, even bigger things.

We are looking for opportunities to obtain funding that would give us the time and resources to support this work from the Curriculum Team.

[kariljordan]

The Carpentries is applying to host an ACLS Leading Edge Fellow. If selected, our fellow will join the Core Team for two years and be responsible for:

• Leading Curriculum and Community Development activities that support the translation of Carpentries training materials and community resources.
• Developing community, processes, and infrastructure to support internationalisation of Carpentries (Data, Software, Library) lessons and community development resources.
• Communicating with the community regularly about progress and impact of internationalisation efforts.

[acrall]

Two sessions on translations/internationalisation were held at CarpentryCon, 1-12 August 2022. The recordings are available on our YouTube channel: Session 1; Session 2

[acrall]

Funds have been budgeted for 2023 ($1,240 from Community Development Team; ~$10,000 from general) for the translation of some of our key resources (e.g., Code of Conduct)

[acrall]

There are ongoing conversations about the resources that we should translate and in which languages. The Code of Conduct seemed appropriate, but there are concerns if reports are submitted in a language unknown to members of the CoC Committee. This will require further discussion. I am also collaborating with members of The Turing Way to pull together a blog post detailing challenges in this space. We will be co-hosting monthly meetings to continue conversation with anyone interested in supporting this work.

[acrall]

Myself and our Communications Manager continue to meet with The Turing Way to share ideas surrounding internationalisation. The Code of Conduct Committee would like for us to translate the CoC but want to be sure we have a workflow in place for reports submitted in a language unknown to committee members. I have been seeking information on a translation provider who has expertise in providing these types of services but have been unsuccessful. We started an account with CrowdIn to test its services to support translation within the community. This is the platform that The Turing Way uses and has great potential for our community. A next step is to pull together community and Core Team members to discuss whether we want to use Transifex or CrowdIn for our work moving forward so we are utilising the same platform for co-working / development

[elletjies]

Mellon foundation grant application to upscale Glosario

[ErinBecker]

Proposed Activities, Outputs, & Outcomes of the Mellon Foundation Grant (under review)

Integrate Glosario into The Carpentries' lesson infrastructure. We will create an interface that automatically links glossary terms into lesson material. This will allow quick reference to terms defined in Glosario. To achieve this, we will:

• update the open-source R package for Glosario to synchronize and process glossary revisions from the central GitHub repository;
• provide the functionality to auto-generate a stand-alone markdown or HTML-formatted glossary from a set of terms;
• provide the functionality to perform a search of terms in the glossary by tokenizing text into ngrams and removing stop words;
• update the R package pass text to insert the glossary in each lesson automatically. Updating Glosario's contributor documentation. The README file includes a detailed guide to helping new contributors make their Glosario submissions. The guide has been translated into six different languages. We will update the guide per accessibility guidelines. Glosario contribution drive. Carpentries community members, particularly those currently in the process of becoming certified Instructors, make submissions to the glossary as a new translation in the form of a pull request, GitHub issue, or by using a Google form. We will host a ‘codefest’ during The Carpentries Executive Council meeting to encourage new contributions to Glosario.

[acrall]

Released a blog post, first in a series, to highlight the opportunities and challenges for localisation in our community. Have added a fortnightly meeting to the Carpentries community calendar for community members interested in localisation. The meeting is co-hosted with The Turing Way

[acrall]

There has been a lot of recent activity in the #internationalisation channel in Slack. Pasting messages below.

From @zkamvar: I'm pleased to announce that {sandpaper} version 0.16.0 and {varnish} version 1.0.0 have officially been released! With this new version, the menu elements and site navigation are now in the language of the lesson. Thanks goes to everyone in this community for your collective efforts. Special thanks to Joel Nitta for kicking off the translation machinery in {sandpaper} (and providing the Japanese translations), Yanina Bellini Saibene for her organisation and translating to Spanish, and Alycia Crall for her work to connect the communities! I've written a guide for translators in https://carpentries.github.io/sandpaper/articles/translations.html. You can find details of what changed in https://carpentries.github.io/sandpaper/news/index.html#sandpaper-0160-2023-12-13 and https://carpentries.github.io/varnish/news/index.html#varnish-100-2023-12-13. I have also re-rendered all of the official Spanish translations to use the new versions immediately (e.g. https://swcarpentry.github.io/git-novice-es/01-basics.html)

From @froggleston: As promised, we have a new CrowdIn organisation to start democratising translations! https://carpentries.crowdin.com/ For the moment, @tobyhodges and I will work through setup and how we might organise how translated repositories/lessons will be managed, but we hope to be able to work with the community next year to roll out lesson translations

[elletjies]

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation approves grant for Glosario - https://carpentries.org/blog/2024/01/mellon-foundation/ Breaking Language Barriers in Data Science: Glosario Codefest Event - https://carpentries.org/blog/2024/02/Glosario-Codefest/

Glosario CodeFest Etherpad - https://pad.carpentries.org/Glosario_Codefest_2024

[elletjies]

Presented Carpentries in Africa at Let Us Lead: Data Upskilling for Africans, by Africans @GDDF

Dive into the world of data upskilling for social impact (DSI) in this ground-breaking panel discussion. Expect a captivating discussion by African, data upskilling experts who will unearth how organizations are investing in localized content, platforms, tools, and training opportunities, designed to empower African communities through data literacy. This session is crucial in demonstrating the importance of localism, and illustrating the outcomes of centering African knowledge and voices in data and AI training to drive the continent’s human resources forward in the next decade. As the field of DSI grows, so do the opportunities to shape African data futures in Africa’s own image. Join us as we unveil examples and insights, equipping each participant to embark on or supercharge their personal data upskilling journey. This is more than a panel discussion—it's a call to action to shape Africa's data destiny together.

https://digitaldevforum.course.tc/t/gddf-2024/events/let-us-lead-data-upskilling-for-africans-by-africans-hsXMzjKpqUhkRQGHhLZ7yX

[elletjies]

Showcased The Carpentries in Africa during CZI Open Science meeting 12 June in Boston

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XKtAG3jz32Wfr8CcHH-N88pgZTK_ZvHglEiVmlvcEiM/edit#heading=h.qjwpdng3b6at