Since the early days of Swift, I have written small programs from time to time, but since Swift 6.2, I have become a little more enthusiastic (I also have more free time to immerse myself in a new language).
I noticed that the website promotes the translation of documentation into other languages. However, I also saw that not much has happened in this area for years. Is this still relevant, or has it become a lower priority with the advent of AI translators? If it is still relevant, I would like to volunteer to do a German translation.
This seems like a good project as sometimes information and precision loss/gain can occur when translating between two different languages.
I would argue that Automated translators are an accessibility tool for 3rd class citizens[1] in various communities as translators are meant to communicate information in scenarios where a polyglot[2] who can speak the two language are unavailable to provide more effective supports. Trying to make programmers who don’t speak English as a first language into second or potentially first class citizens would be a more inclusive option.
We also have a Chinese Room[3] issue with translators where they pass their Turing test equivalent without understanding the underlying intricacies of both languages and as such may produce mangled text which may only convey vaguely the intended information rather than a technical specification which is useful for very specialized or uncommonly referred to fields like memory safety, structured concurrency[4] and type systems. Additionally there is a risk that invalid code could be made by translating code and as Swift code is English descriptive[5] various parts of Swift may become harder to grasp if no additional information is provided.
Tangent:
Potentially we could introduce a localization tool that allows for writing Swift with non-English statements and then convert them to English Swift at compilation time.
Today I setup the repo for the German translation of "The Swift Programing Language" book. So far, I've just created some basic files to get the view of the landing page displayed in the browser.