Parlez-Vous is Team 5333’s attempt at helping up and coming teams in the FIRST community. As FIRST expands to more and more countries, language barriers become an increasing problem and can hinder many teams from reaching their potential.
Programming is something largely based in the English domain, and so Parlez-Vous was created as an attempt to overcome this barrier. Parlez-Vous provides a foundation to try and get people who speak other languages to understand the concepts behind basic programming and robot control, in a language or dialect that they are comfortable using. We’re hoping that once they are comfortable they will take the plunge and start using more advanced languages and frameworks.
For more information, I urge you to read the README file in the repository. If you speak multiple languages, it would be great to have you contribute to the repository to add more translations and fix any translation issues present. Thank you very much
Most of the words should be present in the french sample translation. If you want to make sure everything is good, there are samples of Robot Programs on the parent repo that should contain all the words likely to be used
It is an interesting concept, but I am not sure how feasible it is. The biggest issue I see is that when you start translating existing function names it becomes that much more difficult to find documentation on them. There is tons of documentation on the we on the programming languages we use, however even if you find a french language reference for C++ it will not have a definition for a 'si-puis" statement, only for an “if-then” statement.
I am a native English speaker, so I cannot comment on the difficulty of learning a programming language that is English based, however I regularly work on code written by non English speakers, and having all commands and keywords in a common language is what allows us to work across language barriers.
This is the main reason it translates to Lua instead of C++/Java. In the Lua backend I’ve tried to make the names as clear as I can, however once we get more translations I’m looking at compiling a help manual in each language that is supported. But, since the project is still in it’s infancy, that will likely be a while away yet.
I’m not sure how successful the project is going to be, but if we can help at least 1 person, I’d call it a success.
Sadly in China you cannot access GitHub without some sort of VPN. Making it quite difficult for a team’s there to access and use your repository. I don’t really know anything about other alternatives but if possible, it would be very helpful to mirror your repo on a website that is accessible in China.
P.S. When the project is ready, I’d be more than willing to send a link out to the teams in China so just PM me
Not quite sure if this is needed for most languages but good luck in your endevour. I imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to learn how to code being a non English speaking person. Similar to how we learn new words such as Dim, Sub, sudo, etc, I think it’s more of getting across the meanings of words that matter rather than the words themselves. I’d imagine there would also be a lot of coding resources and tutorials in other languages for other countries. However, I could see this being useful for countries that are not as developed and that don’t have as many technical resources available. Most modernized countries such as France or Mexico do plenty of coding though.
