Luis de la Orden Morais

Luis,

> I was wondering if you already had your course
> translated into Portuguese?

No, I currently have no translations. I use only English, as it is the most
widespread language, and the most commonly used language on the Internet. It
is not perfect, but it does make it accessible to the majority of Web
developers.

The general problems I have with translations are these;

1. I like to keep all versions of my content on my own site, since I wrote
it, and it is my copyright. If I decide to change something, I like to be
able to change it immediately without having to ask someone else to change
their copy, and hope they listen.

2. The tutorial itself is 100 printed pages long - about 300 KB of text or
46'000 words. That is a big deal, and people who offer to translate rarely
offer to translate the whole thing and never complete it anyway. The
tutorial relies on all of it being available, so having only parts of it
being translated is fairly useless.

3. The biggest problem with translations is that they go out of date very
fast. Browsers and technologies change very quickly, and it is extremely
important to keep a tutorial in line with the current situation. There are
plenty of tutorials lying around that nobody got around to updating, so they
remain old and inaccurate (often talking only about browsers that are not
even used any more).

This is also one of the reasons why I have not had any books published on
the subject. Some of the most commonly used books about JavaScript still
deal with only Netscape 4 and IE 4, and that is simply unacceptable in the
real world.

I can update the tutorial whenever something changes, but since I do not
understand Portuguese, that would need me to pester translators every time,
so that they translated their version. The last update I did was for every
page in the tutorial, meaning the whole thing would need to be
re-translated. This gets unmanageable very quickly, and means that the
translated version simply falls behind the other version, meaning it holds
out-of-date information, and potentially bad advice, something which I
cannot allow.

For these reasons, I doubt that my tutorials will be available in any
language except English, unless I learn that language myself. Sorry that
means it is not available in your native language, and I hope that my
readers, like yourself, are able to understand English well enough to read
and understand it.


Mark 'Tarquin' Wilton-Jones - author of http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/