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Marcelo Gonçalves
Marcelo Gonçalves

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Translations can boost your learning process

For one of my PRs that will take part in Hacktoberfest 2019 I've chosen the task of translating a book. My native (spoken) language is Brazilian Portuguese. My first goal was to ease Portuguese speaking beginner programmers learning process. But what I found was a totally different result!

Actually, translating this Nu Shell book is helping me to learn more! It is fantastic because my original goal is still being achieved while giving myself an unexpected reward. (Haven't heard of Nu Shell yet?)

But how does this learning improvement happen?

  • Sometimes, when in a rush looking for a quick answer, one just goes straight to a book chapter or documentation section, skipping many important parts. When you are translating you force yourself to read through the whole text, start to finish.

  • Before you can assume the job as finished you must revise it. Many times. So you end up repeating the above more than once. You do it twice or even more.

  • When you have no specific purpose while reading maybe you make some diagonal reading, just a skimming to get a taste of what the subject is. When translating you must read the original text with much more attention, dive in to get much more detail. Bam! The more attention you pay to that subject, the more you learn.

And everything I said above is equally valid to transcription jobs too! If you find any podcasts, youtube channels etc that accept transcription contributions, go for it!

I have not submitted this PR yet but if you're curious and want to see my ongoing translation work, it is in a forked Github repo.

Happy hacking!

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