If you can read this then you don't need this

Executive summary: Let's translate some Perl stuff to other languages!

When learning a complex subject one of the important ways to ease the learning is to eliminate all other obstacles.

When learning Perl a non-native English speaker faces both the strange syntax of Perl and the need to read in a language that is not her mother tongue.

Though we can more-or-less accept that in order to become a competent programmer you will have to be able to read English, eliminating that requirement from beginners can make life a lot easier for them.

In the Padre project one of our objectives is to make life easier for beginners.

I believe that for that we need to have various things translated to other (than English) languages.

I know you, who is reading this might already know both Perl and English well enough that you don't need translations but I believe this is one of the ways you can help the Perl community. Especially in your native country.

So if you'd like to help with localization - and you don't have to be a professional translator for that - I have few translation projects with growing complexity:

1. The GUI of Padre - this means a few hundred expressions
2. The Plugins of Padre - another few hundred expressions
3. The error and diagnostic messages of Perl
4. Some of the documentation of Perl

The first two are Padre specific and they are there to warm you up and to help you have a quick success. So far the Padre GUI has been translated to more than 10 languages.

The already existing localized versions of the Perl documentation will be soon available on a web site. I'll make sure that the new translations will also appear soon even if they are only partial translations. They will be also available for local browsing.

If you are interested please ask around on #padre on irc.perl.org or on the padre-dev mailing list. (see info on Padre and on translation intro)