Re: German translation of R5RS

[Freja Nordsiek <fnordsie@posteo.net>]

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Mark does bring up an interesting point. Very good chances to find someone if one reached out to the communities of other implementations like Racket, Chicken, etc. And it would stand to benefit those communities in addition to Guile. If I remember correctly (very good chance I do not), I think the main developer of Chicken is a native German speaker, for example.


Freja Nordsiek

On May 29, 2018 4:08:19 PM UTC, Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> wrote:
>Hi Florian,
>
>"pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <pelzflorian@pelzflorian.de> writes:
>> Please accept my patches adding a German language info file for R5RS
>> and fixing some small errors in English R5RS.  I believe the patches
>> to be reasonably correct.
>
>I very much appreciate this enormous amount of work that you've done!
>
>My primary concern is that I lack the ability to review this, because I
>have not (yet?) learned to read German.
>
>A large technical specification like this is quite hard to produce
>without introducing many mistakes.  Even when everyone in a standards
>committee is focused on the same draft document, errors are frequently
>introduced.
>
>Errors in technical specifications can have quite bad consequences over
>long time frames, because they lead to misunderstandings in the minds
>of
>developers, and thus bugs in code, which may persist for a long time.
>
>At present, most users who wish to read the R5RS have no choice but to
>read the original document written in English.  On the one hand, this
>is
>obviously a barrier and hardship for people who do not know English
>well, but on the other hand, at least they can be assured that the
>document they are reading has been widely reviewed by a large number of
>people over several decades.
>
>If we now invite them to read a German translation which has not been
>reviewed at all (except for the translator), I fear the resulting
>misunderstandings and buggy code that this might entail.
>
>So, I would feel much more comfortable if someone else with good
>knowledge of Scheme would step forward to carefully review this
>translation.  It need not be someone from the Guile community, which
>brings me to the next issue:
>
>Although we distribute a copy of R5RS with Guile, we do not maintain
>R5RS, and it is not specific to us.  To me, this situation seems
>somewhat analogous to submitting a large contribution for the Sqlite3
>library to the Firefox developers.  Firefox distributes a bundled copy
>of Sqlite3, but they do not maintain that library.
>
>However, I admit that this case is far more muddled, because R5RS is an
>historical document, and there's no longer any group that maintains it
>as far as I know.
>
>Are there any German speakers here with good knowledge of Scheme who
>would be willing to make a careful review this translation?
>
>       Mark

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