Towards Open Science training for Ukraine: translating Software Carpentry lessons
Published:
The Carpentries is a global volunteer-based organisation whose members teach foundational coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide, usually by means of in-person or online 2-day workshops.
I have contributed to it since 2015, starting from developing a Carpentries-style lesson on programming with GAP, and later became a Carpentries Instructor and a Trainer.
One of our divisions, called “Software Carpentry”, runs workshops to teach the three core topics: the Unix shell, version control with Git, and one of the programming languages (usually Python or R), using these lessons.
As you can see on the latter page, some lessons are already translated in Spanish. This was achieved using a collaborative web-based platform called Transifex. There is an ongoing work to translate them into other languages (see the public view of the progress achieved so far).
In 2022, I have initiated the project to translate selected Carpentries materials into Ukrainian language. By now, a group of contributors have already translated the Python lesson, which is currently in the reviewing stage and will be published soon.
Next, we have started the translation of several other lessons, including:
in order to have a full set of materials for a standard Python, R or GAP based workshop. Once at least one of these will be completed, we should be ready to organise a Software Carpentry workshop for Ukrainian learners, and hopefully start to build a community of Carpentries instructors in Ukraine.
We are inviting new translators to join this project. A translator could be someone who knows Ukrainian language and understands the content of the lesson. You do not have to be an ultimate expert in the translated topic: the lessons are intended for beginners, and you will be able to learn more about these tools yourself in the process of translation. An introduction to Transifex will be provided: it’s an easy to use tool, which allows you to make your first translation after a few minutes.
Please get in touch with me if you are interested to help!