Hacktoberfest Week 1: Document Translation
Tags: hacktoberfest, opensource, beginners
Published: 2022-10-08 06:05:24

## What is it?
I recently started participating in the [Hacktoberfest 2022](https://hacktoberfest.com/) event. During the month of October, participant need to complete 4 requests labelled with Hacktoberfest on GitHub.
My first chosen task is working on the [Telescoep Project](https://telescope.cdot.systems/). It's an open source RSS feed aggregation website that collect blog posts from contributors to display in a single page for browsing. [My issue](https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/issues/3686) is about adding Mandarin translation to the About Us page of the project with my [pull request](https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope/pull/3698).

A peek of what it looks like:
![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/7y5igup5a42wu6od1l5h.png)

A peek of what I did:
![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/9x7h5tgwrip32tgaj82s.png)




## Process
I kept the format of the document unchanged and tried my best to stick to the wording and especifically the meaning. It's sometimes difficult because differences in grammar structure or just how people use the languages between English and Mandarin.
I find myself having to do minor paraphrasing, as using the exact translation produces rather awkward sentences and phrasings that people either don't use or would find weird, like how machine translation can be.
Changelogs turned out more difficult than I expected because they often have technical details, so that means I need to know the transaltino for them. Sometimes I had to look up translations of technical terms, since I don’t know all the technologies, but it’s not difficult to do.
As I was translating, I have two windows open to comparison. One for each version of the document. It’s easier to do it when you compare the layout and sentences side by side to see what format to follow and how to process the sentences wholly.

## Talking to Maintainers
As I was doing it, I had questions to the maintainers of the repo. I thought of doing a simplified Chinese translation. While I’m primarily use traditional Chinese, I can read that too, and it would take very little effort and editing to produce a version with help of conversion tool. Therefore, I ask the maintainers for feedback on that thought. While it’s more directed toward purely relying on a conversion tool, a maintainer raised a point about whether the translation would sound natural. I replied and said this might not be the best idea, as I might miss certain phrases and terms natural to users of simplified Chinese. It’s more to do with cultural differences. 
As a side note, I also asked about potential legal implication for the open source project if I use a conversion tool, but I was told it’s not something that matters legally.

To be safe, I also asked how much I have permission to paraphrase, as direct translation can risk the wording being clunky or not making much sense. I’m still waiting on the verdict for that, so my draft in the pull request might have to change depending on that answer.

## Learning
I certainly learned quiet a few technical terms in Mandarin, like 快照, 端到端, and單元測試. I also learned the name of quiet a few technologies in English, like Traefik, Microservices, and Elasticsearch
It really helps to have two windows open to see the original language as I translate. It helps me taking in the whole sentence as I do so, which is important for grasping the complete meaning for translation.
This experience helps me realize more that translating isn’t just changing one word for another. It can involve some processing of meanings to produce more natural sentences that native speakers can understand better.