Community-driven efforts to translate educational materials into many languages

The mission of Data Carpentry (https://datacarpentry.org/) is to train researchers in core data skills for efficient, shareable, and reproducible research practices. This mission is achieved by running accessible workshops, providing open-access educational materials, and fostering a diverse and inclusive community of instructors. Initially, all of the lessons were written in English, which means that the workshops and educational materials were only accessible to English speakers. To address this limitation, Data Carpentry began supporting community-driven lesson translation projects. In November 2018, a group of about 24 volunteers from Argentina, Belgium, Colombia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK, Uruguay, and the USA (including Puerto Rico) came together over Slack and GitHub to translate the “Data Analysis and Visualization in Python for Ecologists” (https://datacarpentry.org/python-ecology-lesson) lesson into Spanish. These efforts further motivated Spanish-speaking trainers to offer their workshops in Spanish to coach instructors in Latin America and Europe who would teach Python workshops in scientific computing in their own networks. This community effort is a great example of how computing can be made more open and accessible for non-native English speakers and create more opportunities for collaborations. This talk will provide an overview of how the open science project for translation was carried out and the impact it has had on growing Carpentries communities in Latin America. You can view the “Análisis y visualización de datos usando Python” lesson at https://datacarpentry.org/python-ecology-lesson-es/. You can also read a blog post about the translation effort in English (https://carpentries.org/blog/2019/01/python-ecology-es/) or in Spanish (https://carpentries.org/blog/2019/01/python-ecologia-es/).

Transcript

1. Community-driven efforts to translate educational materials into Spanish Rayna M. Harris @raynamharrs FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute (FSCI)
2. Community-driven efforts to translate educational materials into Spanish many languages Rayna M. Harris @raynamharrs FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute (FSCI)
3. The Carpentries community is global https://carpentries.org/
4. https://carpentries.org/ The Carpentries mission is global
5. https://carpentries.org/files/assessment/ TheCarpentries2018AnnualReport.pdf The Carpentries impact is global
6. But there are still a lot of gaps https://carpentries.org/files/assessment/ TheCarpentries2018AnnualReport.pdf
7. Imagina que tienes que aprender UNIX y Python o R y Git en un idioma que no es el tuyo
8. Imaginez que vous deviez apprendre UNIX et Python ou R et Git dans une langue qui n'est pas la votre
9. あなたが学ばなければならなかったと想像 してくだい UNIXとPythonまたはRとGit ネイティブではない⾔言語で
10. Goal: Translate lesson so they can be taught in the learner’s native language and build communities to foster life-long leaning.
11. Successes • We have collaboratively translated multiple lessons into Spanish. • We are collaboratively translating lessons into Japanese. • There is wide-spread interest in translating lessons into many more languages and dialects.
12. Challenges • Our lessons are collaboratively developed and collaboratively maintained, meaning they… • have many authors who speak different dialects • are constantly evolving and its hard to keep all translations in sync
13. Ideas and contributions welcome @thecarpentries