 Thank you everyone for being with us in this second stage of the tower panel for on translations. And this occasion we'll have Latin America and Africa. Our Hyperledger community has more than 73,000 members in 180 meetup groups and the largest number of tools and applications of the ERT. Its documentation courses and seminars, however, are still mainly in English, a language 80% of the world population do not speak. Hyperledger Latin America hosts this as a call for translations. We believe that translate is to include, to understand, to learn and to save. Tower of Babel is a collaborative complement to an initiative that Anthony O'Dowd and David Boswell, which is with us began 2019 to translate Hyperledger fabric documentation. We want to engage more collaboration and we want to explore future strategies to include languages and cultural mindsets. I'm very informal, so rather than doing formal presentations, I would ask each of you, Claudio, Umar and David, introduce yourselves please. Claudio. Sure, thank you Alfonso for that introduction. Hello everybody, my name is Claudio, I'm from Argentina. I'm one of the co-founders of the Latin American chapter as well. I'm in charge of the translation effort for Spanish translation. And as Alfonso said, we think this is very essential to have a deeper understanding on the technology and what we can do. For us translating also means that we are taking this project and bringing that into our culture, right? Here in Latin America we are very proud of our culture and Spanish language is one of the most distinctive characteristics. So thank you, thank you very much for this panel, thank you for everything that you're doing. Now thank you for all your help, Claudio. Umar. Yes, thank you Alfonso for holding this panel and thank you David for being here with us. Yes, I'm Umar Falla, I'm from Senegal. I'm the lead of the community here in Senegal, South Africa. And I'm also working with some other global, some other African epilogue chapter to form some kind of collective to have more momentum and to have more, to reach more people. And I'm pretty active in also the epilogue translation from English to French. So I'm here today to talk about that initiative, our difficulties and why translating things in translating documentation in French is relevant for us Africans. And yes, we are going to discuss this later. Thank you. Thank you Umar. David, for all of us here, you need no introduction, but for the rest of the folks on the outside, please tell them who you are. Well for anybody I haven't met yet, my name is David, I've been involved with hyperledger for about three and a half years now. Before I came to hyperledger, I'm new to blockchain, but I've been involved in open source communities for, for around 20 years. And one thing I've observed is that translations and localizations are something that more mature open source communities, you know, have done and do really well because as Alfonso has said, we are a global community. There are people literally all over the world who are interested and not all of them speak English. So, you know, inviting them to come in and contribute in their own language, in their own culture, in their own ways, you know, in a way that's appropriate to them. You know, it's something again that I've observed in other communities. So, you know, I just wanted to introduce that as a, you know, contribution that we could do in the hyperledger community. So I'm thrilled to see that people have been interested in that have started doing that do, you know, hopefully want to do more of that. And so my role is here is just to support if there's something that the group of people doing the translations, doing the localizations want to do, you know, you know, that's what an open source community is, it's the people involved, you know, choose to do something. I'm here to support, you know, whatever the people interested in this activity are trying to do. And, you know, we can, we can put tools or processes or whatever sort of support we need, you know, you need, you know, we can help with. So I'm really interested to hear, you know, what comes out of this discussion. Thank you, David. Renato Teixeira, who is also a member of this panel, the electric utility in his neighborhood is doing maintenance today for days. Okay. So he might be able to join us. He might not. If he cannot make it, he has sent his apologies in writing, and it would be quite a loss for everyone. But maybe that's an excuse to have another webinar very soon with all the languages that we couldn't get in these two sessions. My name is Alfonso Govella. I'm part also co-founder of the Hyperledger Latino America chapter. And I'm a co-chair of the Learning Materials and Development Group at Hyperledger. So without further ado, I would like to ask Claudio, Umar, and David. Each of you, you know, in terms of length of the translations, where are you, or we in the case of Claudio, where are you now in this effort of translations? What challenges did you encounter getting to where we are? And how do you like to proceed for the future? What are you? What challenges? What do you see for the future? Who wants to start, Claudio? Yeah, I'll go, thank you. So where are we in the process? We started this process last year where we were able to put everything together, every tool and every workflow together. We actually have a repository where you have all the code where you can help translate. And in there we also have a project management tool because at the end of the day we are handling this like any other project, right? We have over 200 files to translate. I think we are somewhere in the 20% of it. The challenge that we faced was this issue where actually doing a translation requires some technical knowledge because as I said, the workflow for all of this is by having a hithub workflow where you have to pull some code in your computer, do the translation, then push that back. So you need some technical knowledge to do so. So our greatest challenge was first to help people who wants to translate to get to that point. And what we decided when we found out that people were struggling, we decided to streamline the process where we actually have a rule form where you can sign with your address and we send you one specific file to translate and then we merge and we do all the technical chores on our side. Because as I said, not everybody is technical when it comes to translation, right? We have business people and they get frustrated when they have to do this whole full request workflow, right? So basically that's where we are. We have streamlined the process through Google Forms and some management and we are glad to receive some help. What would you like for the future? Or you want to take that for after the rest, I think it's better to do a decision. Umar, tell us about where you are and the challenges that you faced. Yes, thank you for the part. Yeah, yeah, yes, French is, I think I'll start by speaking about my motivation. Like I said earlier, when we heard French, French language, we always think about the European continent, the country France. But it appears and if you are looking in the Francophonie website with the organization with in charge of the development of the language across the world, you are seeing that, let me see, 59% of the French speakers are living in Africa. And there are not the people who are learning French or speaking French in their work or administrative journey across, no, those are people who are speaking French on a daily basis in their real life. So 59% of the speaking people are living in Africa and that is huge. I was kidding last day by saying that French is now an African language and that is the reality. That is the thing that exists. And Claudio, I know you have the same, maybe the same view because Spanish is not a Spanish language anymore because you know, regarding the number of people speaking Spanish, yes. So what I try to achieve when I created the Ipeleger Senegal community is people are willing to participate in the meeting in the learning process in the Akaton, but they don't have access to the learning materials because all the conferences we are doing right now, for example, are in English, all the documentation are mainly or first in English then months later are translated in another language and maybe during that time frame, the version of the software are evolved and new functionality are appearing and so we have to start the process again of learning and being up to date. So in the part of the world that I'm living in, in the African, in the French speaking African countries, we are late, we are behind the English speaking part of Africa. So there is two Africa, it is very, very subtle if you are not living here, but there is two Africa and the English speaking Africa is way ahead. The French speaking Africa because of this gap in knowledge acquiring in translation and such things. That's the thing I want to tackle. I want to give us some chance to be as accurate and as a performance as the English speaking country and give more chance to the young people who are here and who wants to learn new exciting technology like blockchain and all. And yes, that is an initiative I started with the help of David six months behind. We are actually, we are just three people, me included, but what I hope for the future like is to have more momentum and to have a more diverse profile because like you said, Claudio, the first constraint is technical. People are not sometimes maybe not all the people, but there are people who are not at ease with the, with the pull request thing, the git, the push, the commit and things. And the other required, the other required thing that people must have to participate is people must be bilingual, they must speak French and English. And that also is a barrier that we are trying to, to tackle by with the help of automatic translators and that kind of thing. So those are the two barrier and the, the, the, we must have more people participating in the initiative. So for now, I have just translated the, the front page and one other page of the documentation, documentation of the furniture fabric. But yes, for the future, I really want more people, more documentation in a more fast translation process for the furniture fabric documentation for us that and maybe go to go and translate so too for Indy and also brick and platform of, of the furniture. So yes, that's that. We may have lost all funds, but I can answer the question about challenges. And I would agree with what you, Omar and Claudio have both said. I mean, I'll address both of them from my perspective. The, the technical challenge is real. You know, we have, obviously there's languages that have successfully navigated that, you know, we do have, as you say, the beginning of a French translation, the Spanish translation, you know, it's coming along as well. So, you know, it is solvable, but, you know, Rai and I, who have been trying to support other languages have seen that be a barrier that has stopped the progress of several other languages that, you know, initially wanted to come in, you know, we did do a big push, you know, a couple of months ago inviting people into the community. We saw people start on their, you know, contribution journey and then get blocked and not be able to get past that, you know, to, to your own point, where a very developer centric community, we have very developer centric tools, and you might have all the skills to do technical translation. You might be bilingual. You might, you know, be perfectly capable of doing that, but get stuck on, you know, the GitHub workflow part, which is exactly what we saw. People were enthusiastic, got increasingly frustrated trying to get over that hurdle and then didn't, and then we lost, you know, they, they went away from the community. So that's been a shame. So, one thing I would like to see is better tooling that is, you know, a better fit for, you know, a translator versus a developer. You know, I think in a big enough community, you know, I think that can be solved with enough people who have enough, you know, of a diverse skill set, you know, if you're part of a larger team and somebody on that team does have the technical skills, you yourself don't need them. You can collaborate with that person who does have the technical skills. But for the smaller languages that are just getting started, where it's just starting off with one person, you know, they kind of have to be able to do all, and all of those things in order to move forward. So they, you know, it's a, it's a block initially. I, and then to add to Omar's point, I think once something is up and running, we can bring more people into that community. You know, we, we are in a very fortunate position where we have a lot of, you know, Hyperledger has a lot of channels that we can get information out. So once you're up and running, you know, we can share what you're doing and invite more people to get involved. But it's that initial step where it's really probably just that one person trying to get going where I think it's probably the most fragile, because they need to be able to navigate all of that on their own. It can't yet delegate to other people within the group. But I think the good news is we can bring more people in. I mean, Omar correct me if I'm wrong. But for example, you did a, a meetup recently in French. And I think you connected in that meetup with somebody who ended up joining the translation effort. If I remember what you'd shared with me recently. So I think, you know, if, if a language that's getting started wants to take advantage of all the, you know, channels that Hyperledger has, we can do a tweet about it. We can do a blog post about it. We can do a meetup about it. You know, I think there are ways where we can connect you with, you know, people who want to help out. But, you know, it's just, I think the biggest challenge is just when it's that one person trying to start a new language and there's just a lot for that one person to navigate, you know, how do we make it easier for them? So I'd love to hear if there's ideas, again, maybe there's better tools or better documentation or better processes, you know, that might help at that point. Yes. As you say, I'm recruiting people when I'm doing some meetup in French because like I said earlier, I'm in a French part of the world. And yes, the first step is, we all agree that the first step is the most harder one. And yeah, we have to see some ways to simplify the process by, like you say, if you have some kind like 10 or more people, it's more easy to have people do the technical stuff in the name of the others. But when we start, we have to navigate through the documentation and lead all the people through it. And yes, that is the process we have to make, but we are doing it. Maybe it's not as fast as we want here in the French community, but yes, we are trying our best to progress in that way with the help of all the community. Yes, for sure. As I said before, one of the things that we put in for the community, and I think it's taking some traction, is this option where we sent one specific file to some translator and that person gets to translate everything that is inside that file because one of the other challenges is those files are not just text files. They have some technical complications. So what we did is we posted a Google form where any collaborator can just log in and say, hey, I want to do some translation. And we sent as one self-sustained file. We don't send the entire project. We take the technical burden from them. Of course, we have to do it later. But right now, I think what we need the most is people who can actually translate and help, as Omar said, having that dual language, English and Spanish in our case. And most of the time, those people aren't technical, not at all. And that process has worked. Yeah, yeah, it's been working, for sure. But on the downside, we have a little extra overhead in managing that process. But I think that way we were able to harness a lot of contributions that we weren't able to do on our own. That is essential to us. Because it's not only moving past the technical aspect, but it's actually a very long documentation. It needs a lot of hands working on this. It's a lot of work for one or two people alone. So we need help on that, for sure. And my thought is, again, other open source communities have done this. So this might be a problem that we can learn from others who've solved it, just to share. And you may have already seen this link, but I'm going to drop a link to Mozilla's translation localization tools. So maybe there are things that we can just adapt or adopt from other communities. We don't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel ourselves. Totally, totally. The thing about translation is that when we started, when everybody started, we already have a specific workflow that we have to follow. Because you need to write in a certain way, you need to do a request, and you need to push that to the main repository. So even though that's what we did, we tried to improve or help the people who isn't technical, but I'm not sure how far away we can go from this established workflow. Right? That's the challenge, for sure. Apologies, I was popped out. No worries. No problem. Okay. Yes, I would like to add that for me, translation is a very acute subject in that global world that we are living in, a world that was big, but we were bigger with the pandemic of the coronavirus, so now we are all interacting. Because I had the chance to know plenty of people since the beginning of the all remote, all webby thing, and I'm glad thankful for those people I know. But in the translation, it's very acute because it is a matter of diversity, of inclusion of people of underrepresented minorities. Like, you all know that we have sexual, you have sexual minority, we have gender of Russian think question, who are very actual nowadays. But the one gap or the one minority people don't see often is the language minority, the people who are not speaking the dominant languages. And since we are here in Africa, because I speak from that point of view, we are very close to the Western world, to the Western, to the European or American world, a little less to the Chinese or Asiatic world. So we don't feel very included in all those process of technology or sharing in all. Now we are seeing more and more orientation toward Africa. But yes, being a translator, being someone who allow people to access the knowledge is very important for me and for I think all the people who are participating. And that is a very, very big topic for me of diversity, of inclusion, of this part of the world. Definitely, that's a key issue. Translation is inclusion. For sure. There are many gaps, as you mentioned. But the gap of translation is there's also, sorry, there's also one big benefit that we got from this translation effort, which is that once you start doing this translation, you get a deeper understanding of the technology. That's one of, for me, was one of the biggest goals or benefits of class. I, as you can see, I can't read in English, but going through the process of understanding that English text and translating into Spanish, it forces us to understand from the inside out how it works. So last year, this as an anecdote, last year from the Latin America chapter, we gave away a free hyperlinked fabric course. And one of the things that all of the attendees were saying is that they weren't able to understand, let's say, the documentation. That's why we started in the first place. And after we moved along, more people started to join that course. People felt more secure and they felt at ease knowing that they can read this documentation in their own language, because that way they were, it's easier to understand, right? But for me, the message I want to say to everybody who is watching is that what you get in return of doing this effort is the knowledge of the technology and what you can do and everything. It's all about the knowledge. I agree with both of those benefits. I mean, absolutely, inviting people in in their own language makes the community more inclusive. It's a huge barrier to get involved with the community if they're not speaking your own language, literally. And then I agree with Claudio. I mean, this is helping people learn the technology, which I think ultimately is something we are all interested in. I'll just add a third benefit if I could just share feedback I heard from the Fabric Documentation Working Group that did work with the translators. It even makes the English documentation better. What they heard is that they would have somebody translating the information and that person would have to read the English documentation very closely, so they would get patches from those translators to make the English documentation better. So it's not just taking something, putting it into another language. Everybody's also collaborating on the root documentation itself and improving it. So I think this makes it more available to other people and improves the English version as well. So that's just yet another benefit. We are running out of time, but what you have said is that to translate is to include, to understand, and to improve in our own mindsets. With that, I'd like to refer you to the link that David just posted in the chat, and that's a way of getting involved in this work. We'll welcome every help you can give us. Yeah, absolutely. Please do join that link on the chat channel if you're interested in continuing the discussion. Yes, totally. I'm there, so just ping me. Yeah, or ping us all. But just I'd like to finish by saying, click please on this link because translation is as important for contributing to open source project that contributing code or anything for that matter. Translation is as important as writing the console. If you can't write code, please help us translate and get people access to that knowledge. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Alfonzo. Bye, everyone.