Not long ago little and I had a chatterbox conversation on this topic, because he just set out to translate the perlfaq into german. And he is not the only one: bjelli has already started a project for a German Translation of the Docs.

why

Even the faq is huge, so it is no small amount of work - but bjelli and little have valid reasons, I think:
little contributes to http://www.perl.de, a german forum for Perl - Users, and often encounters young people willing to learn perl that don't have sufficient knowledge of the English language to be able to understand the faq or any other part of perldoc.
Usually the persons in question are young and just have learned English for a short time at school. Should that be just tough luck?
Another point was the rising popularity of PHP (esp. in Germany, I guess this will be the same in other non-english-speaking countries) - with PHP the docs are available in several languages (not with the distribution itself but ready for download) - This makes it considerably easier for the student starting to dive into any scripting- and programming language.
Yes, there are books in a whole variety of languages - but I wouldn't expect a 14 year old to buy any technical book - they are expensive.

I can say the following about bjelli's motivation:
bjelli teaches perl both in adult education and at the university in austria. even the university students often don't know enought english to appreciate the man pages.

she started the project "Deutsche Perl Doku" http://perlwelt.horus.at/Doku/ in the summer of 2001, but after a short period of activity the work has pracically died down. the goal was/still is to create german translations in the pod format and feed that back into the normal perl distribution. there's a CVS server with 5 finished files, 5 more are "works in progress".

what now?

Of course I can tell anybody, if the books are too expensive for you, ask somebody to give them to you as xmas or birthday present.
Or I can translate the faq ever so often, because a faq question in http://www.perl.de comes up, and I have to translate parts of the faq for the one that asked.
Or we can try to set up a combined effort of German monks and mongers and French monks and mongers and Spanish speaking monks and mongers, to provide a version of the docs in those languages.
This will be difficult and a lot of work - bjelli and little already started doing their part and both a willing to translate more - What do you think? I especially would like to hear the opinion of Monks whose native language is not English.

This meditation is brought to you with the kind permissions of little and bjelli. Thanks to both of them.

neophyte Niederrhein.pm

In reply to perldoc in translation by neophyte

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