MDN —JavaScript in French
JavaScript & the history of a modern scribe
TL;DR: the entire MDN JavaScript section is available in French. You learn a lot localizing things and speaking with dedicated people.
First of all, for those who never heard of MDN (Mozilla Developer Network): it is basically a wiki for documenting Web technologies, from HTML to Web API and JavaScript (MDN seems to be recognized as one of the richest source of information about Web technologies).
As of today, I translated and updated the entire JavaScript section in French. I will continue this work in order to maintain it.
Now you might think: why translate MDN, the JavaScript section or any doc like this? the English documentation is rich, edited and updated almost every day by multiple contributors. Today, working knowledge of English is necessary for every developer. All the (exhaustive) dev docs out there are in English (Python, C++…). The English language is evolving fast, more and more words are describing new concepts.
Well… I did it because I could.
MDN provides translation (or localization) as a complete feature of the project. You or anyone else can edit or translate any article on MDN. This means that any localized article is an article of MDN that other contributors can complete, edit, enhance or fix. If this localized version would have been on a blog or on another website, this resource could not evolve the ways it does on MDN.
“Resource”: this is a relevant term for the documentation on MDN. Every article is not something promoting Firefox over Chrome or an incentive to download Firefox, every article is generic (agnostic one might say). Every page can be used to develop on the Web based on standards. This is partly why I contribute and why MDN corresponds to my idea of Mozilla’s Manifesto. In the end, it doesn’t matter if you choose to browse the Web with Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari or Opera. It matters that you can choose one or the other. MDN is under Mozilla’s umbrella but it is a resource anyone interested in the Web can use.
Enough about MDN, let’s talk about the translation.
Localizing — Sisyphus as a Service
A wiki is a moving ground, every day fixes are added, new pages are created, content is being reorganized. This means that when you finally finished one page, possibly two or three pages have been updated during this time: better be patient ☺
Localizing the JS section has been almost one third of new translations and the rest of updates, maintenance.
Every section of MDN is curated and driven by an awesome Mozilla employee and the same goes for JavaScript. It means that their job is precisely to update and enhance this documentation every day of the week. Being a contributor means that you deal with everyday work and life and that you cannot invest as much time as employees. However, creating a resource from scratch represents a lot of work to form the final form of a good article (research, good wording, relevant examples, fetching data all around, synthetizing…) while localizing is “just” reading, understanding and translating. That said, it took a lot of time (1+ year, almost editing every day) to get there. And it will truly never be done, I managed to sync with the English version, maintenance is only beginning.
MDN is not perfect regarding the localization process however, since I started contributing to it, I can only see Wikipedia as the only other truly localizable common (maybe did I miss something?).
Localization is sometimes putting you at the edge of a language. English is evolving fast, new words are becoming part of the language. But French is somehow reluctant and more stable, so how do you translate a concept that doesn’t even yet exist in your language? (e.g. polyfills and promise vocabulary) This has been very interesting and there is still a lot of questions to answer ☺ Thanks to Clochix and Christophe Porteneuve (I owe you an answer).
Team spirit
“Everything is awesome”
Mozilla is a blend between contributors and employees and I tend to see this as a symbiotic relationship where one side needs the other to achieve a common goal.
I have had the chance to meet awesome people in the French speaking Mozilla’s community and in the MDN project. What I learned contributing completes what I am learning professionally: on the technical aspect (JS, ES6, tools) as well as on the social aspect (meetings, sprints, chats, projects).
When it comes to contribution, MDN is a really active and welcoming project. I can’t help but thank every contributor and employee helping me (kudos Florian and Jean-Yves for all these pages moves and macros edits!) during what has been my project for some time. Other words than mine will describe that better, thanks Sheppy:
We use the word “community” a lot at Mozilla, and no less so on MDN. But, more and more, I think the word “team” is more apropos.
During this project, I also had the chance to help new contributors get on board, people that I’m sure will contribute long-term to Mozilla, whether it will be MDN or a set of different projects. Getting to know people from all around the world (Japan, United States, India, Germany) is also what makes the strength of a project like MDN. If you think organizing a meeting in your company is complicated, try to think about how things get tricky with planet-wide timezones ☺(see Christian Heillmann’s post about that).
Conclusion
ECMAScript 6 (or ES2015) is coming and this will be awesome for JavaScript. I will continue to contribute to MDN localizing other resources (HTML here I come again) and maintaining JavaScript documentation. I might get back to some code to apply what I learned in JS (Caliopen?).
P.S. If you are interested in contributing to MDN, drop by on #mdn ;) I’ll be happy to help you.
