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Artem Tanyhin
Artem Tanyhin

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Hacktoberfest PR#1: Language is key for supporting the nation

Hey! Thanks for checking in. This week, I've been working on contributing a Ukrainian translation to an Open Source project, so let me tell you about how it went :)

The project

The project I contributed to is called Telescope. It's a RSS feed aggregator of contributors' blog posts, and it is the main Open Source project of Seneca.

My contribution

I am Ukrainian, and believe that language is one of the key things that defines a nation. So, I decided to add some Ukrainian translation to a part of Telescope's documentation.

I have contributed to some smaller Open Source projects in the past, but the scale of Telescope was much bigger than anything I have contributed to before, so I took some time to read through CONTRIBUTIONS.md and some general tips.

So after I have gone through some of that, I created the issue, like with all Open Source projects, forked the repo, and started working. It is also important that your issue is approved of before you start any work.

Translation

It is surprisingly hard to translate, even if you are fluent in both languages. It appears that when I usually speak English, the language in which I think changes, so perfect knowledge of 2 languages does not at all make you a good translator. Another factor was trying to convert idioms. You know as a rule what a certain idiom means, but it is really hard to find a corresponding idiom in another language.

Because of this factor, the work was a bit more challenging than I initially anticipated, but I do love myself a good challenge to take on, especially when it's connected to my mother tongue.

Finishing up

After my work has been done, I pushed it to my fork and opened a pull request. Pull requests in bigger projects take longer, especially when there are probably no Ukrainian-speakers to review the work.

Summary

Content in Ukrainian is one thing the Internet doesn't offer a lot of. And this is something we should change sooner than later. We need a clear display that our nation is independent and sovereign, rather than depending on enemy resources. I hope that my contribution gets approved soon, and will be a small part of fighting for the definition of Ukrainian nation.

Слава Україні 🇺🇦

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