While we were discussing how to promote the Italian Perl Workshop, and
the planned
Moose, I noted that there weren’t any articles on Moose (Perl’s
modern OO implementation, inspired by CLOS, Smalltalk and Ruby) on
perl.it. Lordarthas of course told me “well volunteered!”… oops.
I pointed out that I don’t really know Moose, and we eventually agreed
that I would “just” translate Jay Kuri’s nice new
Introduction.
Now, there is a reason why translators almost always translate
into their native language. I can write in Italian
reasonably well, but translating into it was a much harder task.
While you’re writing something yourself, you tend to route around
phrases you don’t know how to express, choose different words, simplify
structures, etc. But translation implies some degree of fidelity
to the source, and I found this incredibly hard going. I whined on
#perl.it and, in true Open Source JFDI style, larsen asked
“Huh? Why are you translating that?” and did it himself! Yay,
larsen++!
So my volunteering ended up being limited to making a few
corrections/suggestions, along with lordarthas, dree, and dada.
Opensource translation and review (using wiki/email in this case, but a git repo or
similar could work just as well) can have a fast turnaround, and pick up
many errors/nuances that a lone translator would have to work really
hard on to do by themselves.
An interesting problem with the technical translation was deciding which
phrases to leave in English, and which to translate. Looks like “coercion”
is staying in English (followed by an explanation) instead of using the
Italian “coercizione”. And the title is surprisingly hard to translate,
as none of the words for “gentle” map well into Italian. Though it’s
less cute than the original, the least awful alternative seems to be
“Una breve introduzione” (a brief introduction).