Many people in our community actively contribute to rOpenSci projects. Many others would like to contribute but aren’t sure how to go about it.
Wanting to get involved in rOpenSci or “give back to open source” means different things to different people.
Ideally, a person should be able to find a way to contribute that meets their needs and fits our mission.
We created the rOpenSci Community Contributing Guide to make finding paths to contributing more transparent and sustainable.
I am interested in translating the rOpenSci Community Contributing Guide into Japanese.
Should the translation be done personally?
Or is it better to work with the original project in some way?
(For example, use gettext to send a pull request to the original project.)
Hi @kozo2,
I’m rOpenSci’s Community Manager and an author of the Guide. Thank you for your interest! I see that you’re on the Bioconductor Community Advisory Board, along with “friend of rOpenSci” Leonardo Collado-Torres.
Thank you for being patient while we thought through this @kozo2. rOpenSci has been internally discussing ways to better serve underserved groups, and translating some of our guides and documentation is one of those ways. The short answer is we would love to have a Japanese translation of the Community Contributing Guide but we don’t yet have the capacity to work on this.
Should the translation be done personally?
Or is it better to work with the original project in some way?
Ideally, translated versions of things like our Community Contributing Guide and Dev Guide would be done in collaboration with us and hosted by us with a url like https://contributing-ja.ropensci.org. In early 2022, we’ll begin to plan how to do these sustainably so that they remain in sync with English version updates and that we don’t exploit free labor to create and maintain translations. We can’t yet guarantee which languages and communities we will support in year one. Part of our planning will be to decide how to select them equitably.
If you have a more urgent need, you are welcome to do a personal translation. We don’t currently have capacity to help with this but I am happy to answer questions about the Contributing Guide content itself.
Regarding future potential approaches, my colleague Mark Padgham noted deepl.com has a free API with reasonable limit. Once an initial translation is done, any further pull requests could be piped to a separate workflow to auto-translate, open additional pull request, and request approval.
Can I answer any follow up questions for you?
Aside: If you or others are interested, rOpenSci hosts monthly social coworking and office hours (listed on our Events page). The December session is at a Japan-friendly time.