Community post from the Italian Cloud Native Glossary team: Simone Stella, Meryem Fourdaous, Francesco Sbaraglia, Annalisa Gennaro
The Cloud Native Glossary is a project led by the CNCF Business Value Subcommittee. Its goal is to explain cloud native concepts in clear and simple language without requiring any previous technical knowledge. We are in the process of translating the English version of the Glossary into as many languages as possible. This week we focus on Italian and the team that localized the Glossary for Italian speakers!
About the Italian Glossary
Italian is a magnificent language! Italian speakers around the world reach a total number of about 85 million people. Within the European Union it is the second most widely spoken native language with 67 million native speakers. About 13.4 million EU citizens speak Italian as their second language. Furthermore, according to Ethnologue, Italian is 21th on the list of the world’s most widely spoken languages. Not bad, ah?
We managed to localize the first 10 terms batch as required, but we already have 10 more in the queue, waiting for reviewing and merging. Translating didn’t take too much to be honest, original terms in English are written in such a plain language that this made it easy to find a correspondence into our native language. It took us more time to organise the team and settle the processes, due to the presence of non-github-skilled and non-tech people that needed a bit of time to get familiar with the tool more than with the technical concepts.
Why do you think localizing the Glossary in Italian is important?
We Italians are socialites, thus we could not help being part of this project!
Jokes apart, the team was ignited by someone who wished to contribute somehow to the community without any technical background and skills. But human beings are not islands, as well as non-tech people. Thus experts jumped on board to rescue the initial enthusiasm (a very much Phippy-like story!). We want to be advocates and evangelists of cloud native and the Glossary is a way to be part of the flow.
Also, although the whole IT field is a strongly English-based territory even in Italy – developers read and write in English likely more than they do in Italian – we find it very important to have the chance to rely on quality content in native languages too. Since cloud native is not simply a bunch of tools and technologies for developers and architects, but more a cultural and organizational approach, the access to knowledge by many different audiences, non technical marketing people, decision makers like C-level people, HR figures, students and even developers with different backgrounds is crucial.
How has the experience been?
Amazingly fun! The team grew within a few days and organised the work around a Trello board, before getting head down into GitHub. We tried to meet up once a week to quickly align (meeting minutes included). This experience surprised those new to open source, being unusual to work with people from other companies (even competing on the market) towards a common goal. The processes were easily understood and set up by those who were already familiar with the tool and the logics behind open source contributions. Taking part in the Glossary Working Group meetings has been a great opportunity to get to know more people from all over the world, in a nice and kind way, with no tension or stress.
Meet the Core Team
Simone Stella – Senior Cloud Systems Developer at Cloudreach, his IT career went through Networking, Development and more recently to the Cloud. Interested in Serverless technologies and CI/CD, very happy to join the CNCF community with the glossary project.
Meryem Fourdaous – Senior Cloud Systems Developer at Cloudreach, she has been living in London for the past 8 years. When she heard about CNCF and the goal to translate the glossary to Italian, she was thrilled to be part of the challenge. It has been a great way to bring her experience and help develop new ways of working for the whole team.
Francesco Sbaraglia – Senior Manager SRE & AIOps/Observability Tech Lead EMEA at Accenture, he is a Senior Site Reliability Engineering and Chaos Engineering Coach. He is currently growing the SRE & AIOps Capability at Accenture. Public speaker at SRECon EMEA, DevOpsCon and Data&AI Europe. Very happy to join the CNCF community with the glossary project, absolutely looking forward to being a speaker at the next KubeCon.
Annalisa Gennaro – Head of Marketing and Communication at SparkFabrik, CNCF silver member. She was struggling to find her own way to contribute to the community lacking any technical background, and to approach the Cloud Native universe. Due to her humanistic attitude, she found #TheGlossaryProject the best entry point ever. Hers is the translation of “The Illustrated Children’s Guide to Kubernetes” into Italian; she is somehow involved in the Cartografos working group to try and add a diverse perspective to the Cloud Native Maturity Model thoughts, and contributes to the organization of the KCD Italy event.
How and why should others contribute
It’s time to motivate others to join the Glossary project! It doesn’t have to focus on the localization effort but also contributing to the Glossary in general. How can people get involved?
Students, Cloud Native rookies, experts who love technical divulgation should get together and give a multifaceted interpretation of the Cloud Native jargon. We need various voices to understand which terms need to be still included in the list and addressed, which ones are not to be given for granted, which words and combination of words need to be further clarified with examples and additional metaphors, starting from the English version, which is the source of all other localisations. In other words, the more the merrier, the more the clearer.
Any lessons learned you’d like to share with the community?
Just do it. To those who approach the CNCF community for the first time: just jump into it. Ask, try, read and be part of it as simple as that. Perfection does not exist, progress does. The community will open up and welcome anyone who wants to contribute.
What would you like to tell the community that we haven’t asked?
We love you all. Italy waits for you at the next KCD Italy in November! 🍕
Join the localization effort
Wanna help localize the Glossary into your native language? You can either join an exisitng team or start a new one. Either way, join the #glossary-localizations channel on the CNCF Slack and say hi. There you’ll meet lots of friendly Glossary contributors happy to help and point you into the right direction.