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Translator Guidelines

A woman at a desk writing.

Step 1: Proposing the Translation of a Lesson

Step 2: Writing and Formatting a Translation

Step 3: Submitting a Translated Lesson

Proposing the Translation of a Lesson

If you want to translate a lesson published in Programming Historian, please see the list of pending translations and contact Alex Wermer-Colan to discuss your language skills and translation experience. We look for translations that are rigorous, readable, and consider the needs of an English-reading audience.

Once the translation of a published lesson is approved, one of our editors will create a “Translation Review Ticket” on our Github repository where the peer review will take place. This ticket includes a message board feature, which will be used to document the progress made during the translation review. To avoid delays in publishing, we ask that you submit your translation within 90 days of the editor accepting your proposal.

Translating a lesson

Translating a lesson involves principally the following:

If you decide to translate, please keep in mind that you are addressing a global audience. For matters of style and language choice, please see our Author’s Guidelines.

All of our lessons must also be written in Markdown and follow our technical formatting guidelines, also available in our Author’s Guidelines.

Submitting a Translated Lesson

Once your translation file has been prepared to the above specifications, you are ready to submit it for peer review.

We have a Programming Historian project page at GitHub, where we maintain two repositories (a repository is a place to store related files and folders–you can think of it as a kind of folder). One of these, called jekyll, hosts the code for the live version of the site you see at http://programminghistorian.org. The other repository is called ph-submissions.

Our preferred way for translators to submit a lesson is to add them directly to the ph-submissions repository (or repo, for short). Thanks to GitHub’s features, you can do this using drag-and-drop uploading actions with which you are probably already familiar. As a new translator, here are the steps:

  1. Create a free account at GitHub. It takes about 30 seconds.
  2. Email your editor with your new GitHub username and your lesson filename. The editor will then add you as a collaborator on the ph-submissions repo. Once you are added as a collaborator, you will be able to make direct changes to the ph-submissions repo, including adding, editing, removing, and renaming files. The editor will also create a folder with the same name as your lesson in the images folder. (If you have other data files that you link to in your tutorial, please ask your editor about them.)
  3. Once you’ve heard from your editor that you’ve been added as a collaborator, navigate to the lessons folder of the ph-submissions repo. Then, drag and drop the markdown file of your lesson from your computer onto your browser window. (If you need help, see GitHub’s instructions). Now click the green “Commit Changes” button; you don’t need to change the default message.
  4. You might have some images that go along with your lesson. Make sure all the image files are named appropriately according to our naming conventions. Navigate to the images folder in the ph-submissions repo. Click on the folder with the same name as your lesson (which your editor should have created for you; if you don’t see it, please contact your editor and wait for instructions). Once you are in the correct folder, drag and drop all of your images files onto the browser window, just like in step 3. You can’t drag a folder of images; but you can drag multiple files at once.
  5. Preview your lesson! Wait a few minutes (usually less) for GitHub to convert your Markdown file into HTML and make it a live webpage. Then navigate to http://programminghistorian.github.io/ph-submissions/lessons/ + YOUR-LESSON-NAME (but replace YOUR-LESSON-NAME with the name of your file).
  6. Let your editor know that you have uploaded your lesson files to the ph-submissions repo (they should get a notification about this, but we want to make sure nothing gets overlooked).
If you are familiar with command-line git and GitHub already, you may also submit your translation and images as a pull request to the `ph-submission` repo and merge it yourself after being added as a collaborator. Please do not submit lessons by pull request to the main Jekyll repo so we can provide live previews of lessons in progress.

Translation Submitted! Now What?

To see what happens after you submit a translation, feel free to browse our editor guidelines, which detail our editorial process. Highlights are below:

The most immediately important step is that your editor will create an issue for the new translation on the ph-submissions repository, with a link to your lesson (that you previewed in step 5). The editor and at least two reviewers invited by the editor will post their comments to this issue.

Wait for Reviewer Feedback

We aim to complete the review process within four weeks, but sometimes delays occur or people get busy and the process can take longer than we hoped.

In keeping with the ideas of public scholarship and open peer review, we encourage discussions to stay on GitHub. However, we also want everyone to feel comfortable with the process. If you need to discuss something privately, please feel free to email your editor directly, or to contact our dedicated ombudsperson (Dr Ian Milligan - i2milligan@uwaterloo.ca).

Respond to Feedback

Your editor and reviewers will most likely make some suggestions for improvements on the “issue” for your translation. The editor should clarify which suggestions are essential to address, which are optional, and which can be set aside.

You can edit your files on GitHub, following these instructions.

Your revisions should be completed within 4 weeks of receiving guidance from the editor on how to respond to the peer review. This is to ensure that translations are published in a timely fashion and do not drag on unnecessarily. If you anticipate having trouble meeting the deadline, you should contact your editor to establish a more suitable due date.

If at any point you are unsure of your role or what to do next, feel free to email your editor or, better yet, to post a question to the issue (another editor might see it and can help you sooner than your own editor). You’ll understand that sometimes it will take us a few days to respond, but we hope the improvements to the finished lesson will be worth the wait.

Let your editor know you’re done

Once you have finished responding to feedback, let your editor know. If they are satisfied with the lesson at this stage, the, Programming Historian’s Managing Editor will review your lesson, move it from the ph-submissions repository to the jekyll repository, and update our lessons directory where it will be published.