Polyglot RepRap

Good point(s). This brings up the whole question of the translation of
the RepRap site into other languages (the Babelfish attempt is
semi-useful, but clearly needs a helping hand).

I'm not suggesting we address this now, but it's something we need to
think about.

--

Best wishes

Adrian

Dr Adrian Bowyer
[staff.bath.ac.uk]
[reprap.org]

Michael Hart wrote:
>
> On Wed, 11 Apr 2007, Adrian Bowyer wrote:
>
>> Quoting Simon McAuliffe :
>>
>>> We have a moderately large spike in traffic today from
>>> [barrapunto.com]
>>>
>>> It's a spanish slashdot-like site. They have an article on RepRap on
>>> their front page.
>>>
>>> For non spanish speakers, that would be:
>>> [babelfish.altavista.com]
>>>
>>
>> Cool! A _lot_ of people in the world speak Spanish (not me though).
>> Mandarin, anyone?
>
> Actually, I would think that doing something in Mandarin would
> be one of the biggest ways to get things rolling out there.
>
> Michael
>



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Putonghua (Mandarin) is not much worthwhile. The Chinese have been pushing English as a second language to an extent to where I understand that there are more Chinese learning English than there are speaking it as a first language in the rest of the world.

Spanish and French speaking countries have been somewhat more resistant to learing English as a commercial language so they might be good candidates.

For untapped, underdeveloped population pools I'd look at Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, Farsi and Pushtun.

Once we really have the "how to" bits done I have a friend who is a foreign aid worker originally from Zimbabwe who operates out of Namibia these days. She's been following the progress of RepRap for over a year now and is very interested in it as an economic empowerment possibility. I am pretty sure that she could get funding from the EU or the Danes to make localised Bantu dialects versions of the website.

---

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Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

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