Obtaining Technical Documents In Obscure Languages?

duffbeer703 asks: "I'm a computer consultant who is currently working on a project to enhance computing and network resources in Central Asian universities. One of the problems that we have encountered is a lack of documentation and manuals written in local dialects. Most of these countries (Kazakstan, Tadjikistan, Mongolia) were former Soviet republics and have signifigant numbers of people who speak Russian or English. Other, more remote scohols primarily speak local languages. Does anyone know of places that reprint technical books (mainly C, Perl, Unix and TCP/IP) into less-common languages?"

Don't hold your breath...

[dead_penguin]

I've never looked for technical literature in any language other than English, so I obviously have never come across anything that could help you there. That said, however, I'd be fairly surprised if there is a significant amount of literature translated into the various local languages of your area.

While the marketplace for computer books is growing, it is still relatively small and changing very rapidly when compared to something like mainstream classic literature. Publishing companies are out there to make money above all else, and as sad as it is, catering for a niche market within a niche market just isn't one of their priorities.

The way I see it, you have two options to help out, and would probably be best served pursuing *both* of them:

1. Teach the students English. It's one of the major languages in use on the internet, and doing so would open up many, many more resources to them. Also, having a second (or third) language has never hurt anyone; in fact, it'd probably make their future job prospects a lot healthier.

2. Translate some documents yourself. There's a wealth of public-domain documentation out there that does what you want it too, unfortunately it's in English. If you and some other multilingual people you know go and start translating them into the local languages, you would not only be helping the students you are doing this for directly, but also all other native speakers of these languages. This'd probably be fairly time consuming, but if a community grows around this effort on-line, progress should pick up quickly.

I realize that this isn't really the sort of info you were looking for, but hopefully it does help a bit.

major titles available in Russian too

[Quietti]

Last time I was in Moscow, I was amazed at the variety of material that was available in Russian: K&R's C classic, Perl cookbooks, TCP/IP programming, etc. However, unless you have relatives studying in those polytechnics with western connections, it might be a bit difficult to locate and purchase copies.

Ultimately, mail-ordering the original English books from Finland, Germany, Hungary or Poland, might be your best shot. Bear in mind that most western mail-order shops do not accept credit cards from Russia and other formerly soviet countries, though, for fear of fraud, which might be a problem. Good luck!

O'Reily

[Grey]

ORiely does publish some of it books in Russian, and they are sold in former SSRs so that might help, some at least since all the Kazak, Iusbeks, etc that I now speak better Russian than english. AS an Added bonus they are much cheaper than the english ones my SO got the Perl Cookbook for about $2 in russian. (Cheep unbleach newsprint, and perfict binding (much cheaper and not as good as normal OR US book)).

Re:Don't hold your breath...

[harmonica]

I can only support the "teach the students English" part. It often strikes me that people want translations of rapidly-changing API docs. There is just no way even the major enterprises (IBM, Sun) can afford this. It would require many skilled translators and a lot of time, thus a huge amount of money.

If people start reading English docs, commenting their stuff in English everybody will be better off. Imagine a French / German / Russian enterprise where foreigners (from India etc.) start working - no way they would understand the local language fast enough. Smaller countries don't seem to have much of a problem there (like the Netherlands) - they tend to have a better understanding of English, maybe because a lot of the shows / movies on TV are not translated but simply subtitled.

Use English (and check out Prentice Hill)

[willis]

I know that Prentice Hill (sp) makes a lot of international version of their books -- (Chinese and English, I think some Indian languages as well). -- you might want to check them out.

My best advice is to get the students up to speed in technical English. It might be hard, but the advantages are HUGE. Language encoding issues, MAN pages, new books, tech news, cooporation with other third world nationals.... it's all in English (from what I've seen, admitedly(sp) not much)

willis.

Re:Use English (and check out Prentice Hill)

[unitron]

I'm pretty sure that's Prentice-Hall, unless we're talking about two different companies.

It may make sense for "them furriners" to learn English instead of waiting for translations, but when was the last time you bought any hardware with a manual that didn't seem to have been translated into English from some other language? I probably know more about Japanese sentence structure than I think that I do (since I don't speak Japanese) just from trying to puzzle out the intended meaning of manuals allegedly written in English. Are these other poor guys going to have to learn proper English and then learn mangled English in order to understand tech documents?