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Obtaining Technical Documents In Obscure Languages?

Posted by Cliff on from the literature-in-your-local-dialect dept.

duffbeer703 asks: "I'm a computer consultant who is currently working on a project to enhance computing and network resources in Central Asian universities. One of the problems that we have encountered is a lack of documentation and manuals written in local dialects. Most of these countries (Kazakstan, Tadjikistan, Mongolia) were former Soviet republics and have signifigant numbers of people who speak Russian or English. Other, more remote scohols primarily speak local languages. Does anyone know of places that reprint technical books (mainly C, Perl, Unix and TCP/IP) into less-common languages?"

1 of 6 comments (clear)

  1. Don't hold your breath... by dead_penguin · · Score: 3

    I've never looked for technical literature in any language other than English, so I obviously have never come across anything that could help you there. That said, however, I'd be fairly surprised if there is a significant amount of literature translated into the various local languages of your area.

    While the marketplace for computer books is growing, it is still relatively small and changing very rapidly when compared to something like mainstream classic literature. Publishing companies are out there to make money above all else, and as sad as it is, catering for a niche market within a niche market just isn't one of their priorities.

    The way I see it, you have two options to help out, and would probably be best served pursuing *both* of them:

    1. Teach the students English. It's one of the major languages in use on the internet, and doing so would open up many, many more resources to them. Also, having a second (or third) language has never hurt anyone; in fact, it'd probably make their future job prospects a lot healthier.

    2. Translate some documents yourself. There's a wealth of public-domain documentation out there that does what you want it too, unfortunately it's in English. If you and some other multilingual people you know go and start translating them into the local languages, you would not only be helping the students you are doing this for directly, but also all other native speakers of these languages. This'd probably be fairly time consuming, but if a community grows around this effort on-line, progress should pick up quickly.

    I realize that this isn't really the sort of info you were looking for, but hopefully it does help a bit.

    --

    It's only software!