Help us translate Exercism into your language!

TL;DR; Want to help us translate Exercism into your language? Join the Translator team here!

Introduction

Since Exercism began over a decade ago, the number one request has been for us to translate it into other natural languages.

Only 20% of the world's population can read English and yet nearly all of the top learning resources and documentation are exclusively in English. In many parts of the world (e.g. the US and EU) English has become the de facto language of coding, but for the rest of the world, this isn't the case.

Many people see the solution to this as getting everyone to learn English, but with the introduction of LLMs, it seems to me that it's much easier to translate those resources to 90 languages, than it is to ask 4 billion people to learn to read and write in a different language!

So let's do it!

So today we're officially kicking off our Internationalization efforts with the aim of translating Exercism into the most used 90 natural languages: 🇨🇳 🇮🇳 🇪🇸 🇬🇧 🇧🇩 🇧🇷 🇵🇹 🇷🇺 🇯🇵 🇵🇰 🇩🇪 🇮🇩 🇫🇷 🇰🇷 🇮🇹 🇹🇷 🇻🇳 🇮🇷 🇺🇦 🇸🇦 🇹🇭 🇵🇭 🇳🇬 🇪🇬 🇪🇹 🇵🇱 🇦🇷 🇰🇪 🇿🇦 🇲🇲 🇳🇵 🇨🇦 🇸🇪 🇳🇱 🇲🇾 🇨🇱 🇨🇿 🇨🇭 🇭🇷 🇬🇷 🇩🇰 🇫🇮 🇳🇴 🇮🇸 🇧🇬 🇷🇴 🇭🇺 🇸🇰 🇸🇮 🇷🇸 🇲🇰 🇱🇻 🇱🇹 🇪🇪 🇮🇪 🇲🇹 🇱🇺 🇦🇱 🇦🇿 🇺🇿 🇹🇯 🇰🇬 🇦🇲 🇬🇪 🇲🇳 🇧🇾 🇧🇦 🇲🇪 🇲🇬 🇼🇸 🇵🇪 🇱🇸 🇿🇼 🇸🇴

There's a few steps to getting there:

1. Extract all the English out of Exercism ready to be translated (here's the giant PR that achieved that!).
2. Update Exercism to support multiple languages - with different URLs for different locales, allowing people to easily switch between them, detecting likely languages and maintaining good SEO, etc. That's nearly finished too.
3. Translate the English into other languages. For this we're using LLMs to give us a good first pass, then asking people like you to help us out by checking and improving those translations in a custom translation UI we've built.
4. Launch once we have a good first set done.

We'll have 1, 2 and the UI for 3 finished this month. All that's left is to have a small army of volunteers who want to help check and improve the LLM-created translations.

Want to help out?

We'll be prioritising languages based on how many people commit to helping out. If you are willing to dedicate a few hours to helping people from your country have a resource like Exercism in their language, please sign up as a Translator and we'll be in touch in the next couple of weeks to give you access to our translation UI.

We're incredibly excited to finally be doing this and the impact it will have for people who need things like Exercism the most!