 and a company called Scripto, I organized a local JavaScript user group in Brooklyn, New York called BrooklynJS. Today I want to talk about my feelings on language, both on English language and coding language. So I learned English as an adult, like ten years ago I was never so that I was speaking English at a conference standing here. I was pretty bad at English and but I got around with it. I wanted to go to college in US so I got into this like six-month ESL program. I learned somehow, I graduated from the college so now I do okay job I think but for you to judge. I also learned to code as an adult, maybe four years, four and a half years ago. I decided to pick up on code. I was always in tech industry as a project manager but I was never a programmer. I decided to teach myself code and intersection of those code and English, having those two as adult learner and in second language for your profession and for your speaking language, I got a lot of feelings, mostly frustrated feelings, right? So like when I saw the CFP for this I was like I got the feeling about this I'm gonna submit this. So much like many of the people who started to or teach themselves code past five years I started to learning code by using online tutorials. There that was offered in English. I got through tutorials, I made a little web app and I learned like you know concepts like function and arguments and valuables and I got that like I got like what it does but then like I was like always curious about like why is it called function? Why is it called valuables? Because when I started learning to code four years ago I was already somewhat fluent in English and in English the speaking English you don't speak like oh it's too small. You don't speak like this like oh I'm thirsty so I'm gonna call a function code to go to store and here's my arguments because I'm thirsty I need a water and here's my $5. Give me water like that's not a language like I was like having a hard time calling these three things arguments and like it's still the constant fear of like if I go to technical interview I might call this parameters and they might think that I'm not a proficient in JavaScript because those are called arguments and then like I somehow got through that and then I got a job and it was no and no required me to do this like terminal thing and people says like oh no you should lead a document and like you know notice that I was doing then I started doing note at 10 and 25 so like I'm still new but like still like it wasn't quite the good documentation and go in there and I'm like why is this thing in square buckets I don't really understand what's callback oh is it a function what what so like that was like maybe like fifths six sevenths months of my at me doing the JavaScript so I turned to my native language I googled it in node and filtered it on the Google saying like only Japanese and found a fantastic blog post that the title says the Node.js recommendation for Node.js for front-end engineers and they break down like what the callback is you may try this in try catch but that doesn't work with node because undefined difference and then this here's how you handle the error which is this part and then like they have like commenting on the quote and like I got to understand it so now I was like this is awesome learning things in my native language helped me a lot and I got me got me through building an app I got accepted to talk about conferences so I was like really interested in like offering help for open source projects and those online tutorials saying writing to them saying that hey I really like your tutorials like can I translate this because it's highly beneficial if was offered in my native language and I think there's the other people out there who would benefit from it I don't have my time often end up in not getting any response sometimes like three weeks later template support reply comes back saying like thank you for email we have no plan of expanding the business to the Japan but you know thank you and I'm like I wasn't really pitching you to bring a business to Japan it was just asking to translate it because I'm not even living in Japan oh by the way I live in New York so I wasn't talking about a locality of things but you know you got through you learned it you got comfortable with it you make friends in the community here's the meet-up that I organize a lot of people I talk about stuff and come to a conference and meet more people then I find myself in between these thing called opinions because we're opinionated so one example of opinion talk that I was like really this is do it like are we doing this was have you all familiar with term isomorphic isomorphic JavaScript so as far as I understand that is part of a code that lands on both on server and client and calling that as isomorphic was kind of buzzy word around May this year and people like talking about like no isomorphic is not it's a misuse word you should really call it portable or like it's just a flashy mouth where doesn't mean anything or it's just a new semi-gold and I'm like really like oh like if you've told me now as an adult learner who's like still learning like no this thing that lands on server and client is called isomorphic I don't doubt that I some where that isomorphic word comes from it is registered in my plane that's the isomorphic so I'm like come me some slack like you know and I had like a few of those experience about like the hardest problem in programming like programming which is naming things and like wording of things and then also I realize that the platform that we use isn't nearly equipped to talk about those like different non-English folks like something like this so I'm the answer created the programming language entirely done in alabic and he created the repo name in alabic and get hub made that repo name which he entered in alabic into dash dash dash so if you go to his project it is slash and answer slash dash dash dash right so I was like curious so I was like okay let's try that and I found this okay let's enlarge it so I put a my repo name which came back with green check mark accept it because it's unicode character maybe but then once you hover off from that field you get this pop-up saying your newly positive will be created as dash and to me this is like you know you know as a unicode character it is acceptable but like we don't know what to do with your language so like we just kind of replace it with dash but like my language has like so many characters in you know translating that into dash it's kind of like you know really so I had a series of those things and not just these two things that doesn't fit in this like 15 minutes but I have a series of their things and I came to have this thing that I thought that the tech is freaking anglo-centric and I don't even know what anglo-centric means exactly but seems to be the fitting word and from my experience we just have to deal with it because we are not gonna speak Esperanto each other suddenly and then solve all this problem we like it is the thing like it's not just having a majority of the community being white and male it's that the language even the language that we use it's very very anglo-saxon centric so I had a lot of frustration and feelings and thinking but this year I had a positive experience related to this and that is a IOJS I18n or localized or global we honestly don't know what to call here's another language problem but basically IOJS offered up for a speaker or the the user of different a language that is not English to contribute to translate website into their native language to contribute to a social media site so in February 7th my collager puts out a issue saying you know anybody who want to participate just pass on on this issue and we'll create a working group for you so remember my experience of like you know asking them like hey can I offer you to volunteer to translate I was like immediately yes somebody finally it's giving me chance to do this because I always wanted to contribute like I may be a beginner a JavaScript person but like I'm a native JavaScript Japanese speaker so that's like the best language that I use right so I quickly pass one for Japanese I got added I started translating documents and websites and you know learning the Twitter handles and later Michael asked me to help adding a new users and creating new repos so that's why I came more having a more insight into what's going on and how many languages created and that's why it's been a talk here so two thing Michael did or Michael or I always group did really well was that when you created the new language group it came with one issue called welcome and here's a list of things you do so when interest are high and people are excited there was a list of things that they do so that they don't really need to wonder or argue about like where to start there was a clear start was like there's this three blog post that I want you to translate or and then create this social media account whatever fits your culture doesn't have to be slack blog doesn't have to be medium whatever fits your culture and users just create and do your own thing so I was part of the Japanese working group that and we created our own slack and this is a screencast from one of our member being nominated to be a node collaborator and then we were just kind of you know celebrating and talking about like having sushi and things so in at the end 34 teams are created and here's a list of languages and out of those 34 teams 23 became active groups active meaning not just plus one and somebody has a repo access and the working group access these languages in yellow have actually started learning their own social media translated some documents to be honest after a few weeks to few months most of them kind of dim down after that excitement goes out and you know a lot of complicated moving parts things with IOJS and no JS happens but few teams are still actively doing the thing that they started in February so here's an example of Korean group just created the issue on creating a documentation translated the full point 1.1 documentation translated to a Korean Taiwanese group somehow picked up interest in translating NPM weekly look at this oh you might not be able to see it but 13 days ago they have like a through of issue coming in and they actually have a translated version on the issue so they're actively working on it the Turkish group has been constantly working on it translating the blog post that the evangelism working group publishes and they're discussing translating the new no JS org website not only those three like I'm part of the Japanese group and our GitHub activities are not so high but we are the no JS user group in Japan is organizing a conference in November they have very active slack and that's the thing too like once we created those teams something move the conversation off of GitHub repo so and then it is offered in different language that I don't speak so I can't really track down like what exactly happening within those 34 teams that we created but one thing we definitely had was that the we encourage each other to participate like from Japanese working group one member became part of technical community TSE one member became a collaborator status and he's part of two working group diversity and evangelism and we look at like oh Taiwanese group is doing that maybe we should do this and we kind of like encourage each other but those are the people who would never have contributed to I OJS no JS if that was the issue wasn't there to say like widely open welcome right and then you might be thinking like that's great great great like I would like I would love to do that in my project but like I can't really take that much of work because it is a lot of work and that's why Michael Rogers asked me to help him do that and that's totally legit that's totally fair but experienced this my experience get got me like few insights into you can take care now without taking not much of an effort and this is effort that you can put on your project not only to help people with non native English speaker but also everybody the first thing is light it's simple as a non native English speaker leading English is like just parsing a code like if that comes in the big chunk of the thing it takes up your memory and it takes long time to process but if let's break it down with TLDR so like kind of load map of like how this to polygraph article is going to be or in blood points it's much easier and much faster to understand and I think it's also applies to native speakers to the other thing is set policy and licenses you know my experience of like asking them like hey can I do this translation maybe they had no idea what that meant and having that set first will help you one example is that the another open source project called hoodie hoodie has a very extensive contributed contributors guide one of them a give talks they already have a key to keynote size made and up there everybody can blouse and if they decided to give a conference talk or meetup talk then they can contact them to give that talk the other thing is improving accessibility and going back to parsing a pallet glove do you agree that this is hard to lead it's extremely hard for me to lead a comment on how can use with this tiny font and this contrast I find it it's very easy to lead the style in get how github lenders the markdown file I find it that the contrast of the letters and background and link and spacing somehow leading on github is much easier than anywhere else one other thing is that make it in text and don't do this wacky CSS on highlighting stuff here's how I lead English remember I said I purse a text and I learned that the English as kind of like a code like glamour I go along by line highlighting one by one going to lead it and trying to match with the glamour in my head to understand this so I noticed this recently I was leading this beautiful data visualization that was a one giant image and I couldn't not highlight it and I could not lead it and I kept moving the image and I realized that all that's how I lead English and having that in accessible text helps to be able to lead it by screen leaders and screen data sir tremendous help I did entire online tutorial with help of screen leaders because I could not get hang of just leading the line and getting the concept it was much easier when it was coming from my ear and the other thing is mind the gap so you all are familiar maybe familiar with this looks good to me plus one ship it but I wasn't really familiar with idea of LG GM up until a year ago when I first started at the job and still I don't know why we use this school and quite frankly I don't know what this is and I don't know why we call it ship it to Mars code or deploy something so like you know different people different background have questions and the last thing is maybe sometimes it helps to talk about those feelings no JS hosted a collaborators summit an in-person on conference in San Francisco in August and they flew collaborators all over the world to come meet in person and talk about how they land the project the notes from those meetings are available publicly available on Google and Google Docs and one note from this paragraph mentions that like the collaborators from outside the US saying like you know those Google hangout meetings we need you to speak slowly or notes like a written communication is easier for me to understand them being done by speaking so having those conversation might not be on your agenda for your technical committee meeting but it helps to learn project project every now and then to talk about that so just a summary of five points that I put it up there now and if you are interested in this topic and want to know more or want to understand like how a non native English speakers experience this journey then I highly recommend watching this talk from GDC by Lani Ishmael called how language creates the largest invisible minority for games and in this talk he tells you how to lead alabic and how it is using game develop and it's fantastic 30 minutes you can spend or maybe you're interested in like you know putting in the somebody's shoes and trying to learn language in different language other than English in that case you have beaker script which lets you like a JavaScript in Swedish and then maybe you want to be completely away from using alphanumeric letters you can use language code Nadesco which is a programming language that's been allowed for 10 years and quite a large community around it is there in Japan and this is the documentation part of explaining if else statement it's completely done in English Japanese and if you go in there you can experience this complete lostness and you know not understanding anything part of learning to code in your second language so those are links are in the slide I have a few thank you to put in area who is like super excited that she's here probably earlier is a only person who when I sub-tweet a frustrated tweet like you know entertain my conversation on tweet Michael and Jeremiah who is in court no record team I gave me a lot of insight into what happened at these collaborators summit and what's going on with CSC a company that I work for the toddler see a little bit love who probably the best Anglo Saxon male boss that I can ask for super supportive super supportive I cannot thank you more and Tracy and Amanda who are both conference organizers who entertain my idea of you know I'm thinking about giving this talk and making this and they help me have chat with me and you know submit to the conferences so my slides are up online that's my total handle if you have any questions happy to chat thank you very much