Less Wrong in Other Languages
Less Wrong is a great blog.
Not all people feel at ease with the english language.
I recently noticed that Brazilians are almost not available in this rationalist community.
This sucks, even if it has cultural explanations. So I decided on writing a similar blog model in portuguese (eventually also translating the most important sequences, but let’s not get ahead of time). If it is a language barrier issue, this might help.
Less Wrong design is great, and even though there may be more addictive systems than the karma one, karma is a great one.
So I wondered if it is possible and easy for a non-computer programmer to copy the website design, writing a portuguese version of it, climbing mount rational, and eventually leading people here (since, obviously, learning english is one of the most important rational goals of a 21st century human). Maybe it is not possible because it needs editing in formal languages, maybe because it is not allowed.
But saving the time of building it seems worth a shot. How should I proceed?
We in Russia are cherishing the similar idea. I think it would be great to add to LW engine a feature to switch the language on every article, if any translation is available, like one there is in Wikipedia.
That would be a great idea. I am sure there are people from many countries here that would be willing to translate website content. See for example the recent request for a german meetup.
A separate site should not be needed. LW could pull the browser’s preferred language from the http request and send content accordingly. Most localizable sites also have a language combobox to override browser settings.
I think this is already coded in LW-Reddit software, so the real challenge is translation itself.
There are translation projects for converting the sequences into French, Italian, and Spanish. None of them have more than a handful of articles so far, though, and Portuguese isn’t covered yet. In the meantime, Google Translate is the closest thing to a good automatic translator I have ever seen.
MoR does have a Portuguese translation (along with a number of other ones). It’s 7 chapters in.
That would be great. Unfortunately I think automatic translation would be pretty worthless in this context, so we have to get someone who understands the material to actually do the translations. Perhaps something like the http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/69p/prize_new_spaced_repetition_literature_review_265/ can be set up for materials to get translated, with some of the foreign-speaking LWs doing the judging of translation.
Luminosity is being translated into Portuguese by a fan, but I have no idea how good the translation is and it’s only four chapters in.