Can you use freecodecamp.org in German?

If anyone is interested in working on a German version, I would love to get in contact and talk about it. #germanversionforgermankids

Hey there,

can you describe the problem of They often can’t speak English well enough in more detail?

Why I ask:
I’m also German and I teach web development to kids starting at age 10.
I invite them to FCC and english material in general, and I’ve never had a case with an english-problem. Sometimes it seemed to be an english-problem, but it was a I don't know how to help myself-problem.

I did a learn to help yourself-session, where I showed them how to use deepl and google if they don’t understand some terms. The feedback was great and they learned a meta skill they can use outside of programming, too.

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I agree with you. Children of 10 can master this. It’s inconvenient though. And you may know, that even adults sometimes do not understand English well. It’s not okay in Germany to not know English. But it’s more widespread than a lot of people admit.

Getting a German version is like a UX upgrade. It’s not essential. But it’s helping learners. And for freeCodeCamp it’s a doable task, I guess. I do understand, that it’s a lot of work and it would need enough people interested in doing it.

I also understand if this is not of highest priority for the community.

I have mixed feelings with this one. I’m on the Yes, having this stuff in german feels easier at first, but on the long run, you have to learn english and this is a good learning opportunity.-site.

E.g. we started to translate the ReactJS docs in 2019. If you’re not able to adapt to this fact (= translation started 6(!) years after birth), then you’ll probably have a hard time, because you’ll always have to wait for the german translation of some framework/library/tool. You’ll also decrease the amount of help you can get.

I am trying to establish coding practice in schools. It would be very helpful to have a rock solid solution. That would be a translation not a browser that tries to translate. I agree, that it would be “too much” to offer it all in German. Maybe just the first 100 hours?

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that would be the whole first certificate challenges and the first project

anyway, the curriculum is going to be overhauled soon, it’s going to be completely project based

anyway, you could try to give them exposure to english, it would mean both learn english and learn to code

I think the English version is okay from 5th or 6th grade on. Especially in elementary school (Grundschule, 1st through 4th grade) it’s not feasible. Maybe code.org will have to do there. It’s more visual anyways.

A basic German version of the first courses / projects would be helpful to increase adoption. I am sure of that.

Yes, we agree that having freeCodeCamp in different languages would be amazing. If you can find people who have the technical and language skills to create and maintain the translation, then you are welcome to do it, by all means.

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That’s the perfect answer. I am really interested in making this happen. I do have some funds to support such a movement. I am not technically literate enough to understand, what it means when you refer to technical skills.

My understanding is, that the current github project does not yet support multiple languages. Would “technical skills” involve to create a basic implementation for I18N support as well?

Could you specify, what I need specifically to start such an endeavour? Or should we just fork and come back with a pull request once we think we have a valid solution?

the chinese translation is ongoing, what they are doing is taking each page, and create a new page in chinese
there is too much checking what’s on the page to easily allow for complete translation on the same page
they are also at it for… years?
not even near to completion

here there is a folder for each language that ever tried at it: https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/freeCodeCamp/tree/master/curriculum/challenges

if you want to start somewhere and enter in the habit of transalting technical language, why not the docs? https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/freeCodeCamp/tree/master/docs

in the i18n-languages folder there are the docs in various languages, to make contributing more accessible, there are not all files that are present in english, so maybe that could be a start, bring up to date the existing ones and translate some others

Sounds good. Will look into this and try to start. Is there anyone to go to once I get stick and have questions?

do you mean about the translations? about the contributing process in general?

for contribution you can refer to the contributing docs

if you need help, there are the #contribute subforum here on the forum, or the contributors channel in the discord server, or the contributors gitter room

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I have asked internally in our organization, if anyone is interested in helping with this. Will be back eventually. Thanks for helping out. Feels like a great community.

I have now shopped around intern a little and was surprised of how well the idea was perceived by our engineers. I have 5 engineers who are happy to volunteer and help. In a recent discussion we talked about whether it could be possible to offer to create some sort of universal translation solution via a solution that helps non-tech people like me do the translation with a visual abstraction layer and offer community-driven correction processes while not interfering with software development too much.

For example Crowdin offers their services for free for projects like freeCodeCamp and I know that Khan Academy use them as a service.

The potential of such a bigger solution would be, that it could be universally used by all countries that do not speak English.

My question now is: Should we rather plan to do a small project like a quick German implementation to show off, that we can actually contribute to the community? Or would there be a project lead or someone willing to invest some time with us in exploring whether a bigger solution could be feasible?

I am new in this community. So I do not know how things are done here. Both ways are fine for us.

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if you have a big number of people wanting to partner up or something, maybe you will need to reach directly to the fcc team via email.

the contributing docs are mostly geared toward inidividual contribution

meanwhile everyone interested in contributing could start looking at the github issues and help with what they can

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What mail address would that be? #fccteam

Does anyone know? I am in a Hackathon with two developers for freeCodeCamp today. One element that I would love to do is to inform the creators of the platform of what we’re up to and offer an exchange and support. Will ping @QuincyLarson on twitter as well.

Argl. Found it here: team@freecodecamp.org

Sent an email and redacted links not to violate forum rules:

From: Martin Seibert
To: team@freecodecamp.org
Date: Wednesday, September 9 2020 at 1:22 PM CEST

Subject: freeCodeCamp in German and support from a German company with about 5 developers

Hi Quincy and team,

my name is Martin Seibert. I am CEO of a software company in Wiesbaden, Germany. We employ about 190 people, probably 60% of which are developers and devops. We educate German pupils in learning to code with www.code dot org and www.codecademy dot com. We want to replace www.codecademy dot com with www.freecodecamp.org . To increase the adoption of the platform we plan to create a German localized version of freeCodeCamp under lernen.programmieren dot de at some point in the future.

After a post in the FCC forum [7] I have written the following in the gitter contribution channel:

Martin Seibert @mseibert 12:49
Hi all, I am part of a hackathon on freeCodeCamp in Germany with 2 coworkers today. #hello #bigwave
We are working on figuring out how to contribute a German version of freeCodeCamp for our local school projects and the pupils. If anyone is here, it would be super cool, if you could validate a couple of learnings that I have. I am still trying to find out if those learnings (actually assumptions) are true …
Assumption 1: There is no mechanism in the freeCodeCamp.org-App to switch languages.

Martin Seibert @mseibert 12:55
Assumption 2: If I use freecodecamp.org [8] with a Spanish or Chinese browser language setting, the app remains to be English.
Assumption 3: Current localization concepts assume, that you deploy the platform on a different domain which is independent from the freecodecamp.org [9] domain. There seems to be a repo for freecodecamp.cn [10] here: GitHub - FreeCodeCampChina/freecodecamp.cn: FCC China open source codebase and curriculum. Learn to code and help nonprofits. [11] - Unfortunately the chinese is unavailable from Germany, which may have different reasons.
Assumption 4: Currently it’s not part of the immediate roadmap of the FCC team to support i18n efforts for German. Source: Contribution Guidelines | freeCodeCamp.org [12] (“We do not have any plans for i18n to any other languages other than the above for the foreseeable future.”)

Martin Seibert @mseibert 13:01
Assumption 5: No matter what we do, the FCC team will be hesitant to help and support us. We’ll have to figure things out by ourselves.
Assumption 6: If we host a German version of FCC under https://lernen.programmieren. dot de [13] (would translate to learn.coding.TLD) no one in the community will be angry at us.
Assumption 7: Even if we had pull requests for the master, the FCC team would want us to either only submit them if they are straight forward and low maintenance or rather have them later when the i18n project gains more traction.
I am new to gitter. If you want to reach out to me, you can also use email mseibert@seibert-media.net, phone +49-151-22962964, Telegram Telegram: Contact @mseibert [14] or twitter.com/mseibert [15] - I am looking forward to getting your opinions.

Martin Seibert @mseibert 13:16
Found https://fcc.asia/ [16], which seems to be quite an old version of the ffc.org [17] platform as of 2017 or older.

I would love to get your feedback and get in contact.

Best regards

Martin Seibert