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 localizing the English version of the Glossary into as many languages as possible. This week we focus on Portuguese and the team that localized the Glossary for Portuguese speakers!
About the Portuguese glossary
According to Instituto Camões, Portuguese is the fourth most spoken language in the world. With 260 million speakers (3.7% of the world’s population), Portuguese only trails behind Mandarin, English, and Spanish. A Romance language, along with Spanish, French, Italian and Romanian, Portugues is the official language of nine member countries of the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries (CPLP) and Macau, and the second most widely spoken Romance language (according to Wikipedia).
To this date, the Portuguese localization team localized 39 terms, an effort that took about six months.
Why do you think localizing the Glossary in Portuguese is important?
Unfortunately, it is still rare to find technical content translated into Portuguese. While many Portuguese speakers have some basic English knowledge, technical content in English often represents an additional barrier for those new to the field. The more cloud native content is available in Portuguese, the more people will feel encouraged to contribute to open source and use it — localization is essential to increase cloud native adoption and contributions worldwide. We are excited to do our part for the Portuguese speaking community!
Meet the team
The approvers from the Portuguese team:
Jéssica Lins — A Software Engineer for the Openshift Monitoring team at Red Hat, Jéssica lives in Berlin, Germany. She works mainly with Go and is passionate about distributed systems, observability and getting involved in projects that generate a positive impact. Jéssica is proud to be part of the Portuguese Glossary localization effort because she strongly feels that people of all backgrounds and cultures should be able to access technical content.
Edson Ferreira — A Site Reliability Engineer at Taller Technologies, Edson contributes to the Portuguese CNCF Glossary and Kubernetes documentation.
Bruno Guidone — With a bachelor’s degree in IT Management from Infnet and a DevOps postgraduate certificate from Caltech, Bruno lives in Brazil, where he leads the DevOps team at Mobiauto. He is passionate about learning new technologies and cultures.
Of course, there are many more people behind this effort. Key contributors include Ana Cunha, Matheus Paes Pereira, Luíz Ribeiro, Willian dos Santos Paes, Marcelo Mansur, and Erlison Santos.
Why did you decide to localize the Glossary? Why is it important to you?
Knowledge should be available to anyone, and as the cloud native universe grows, we feel the Glossary will be a valuable contribution to the Portuguese-speaking community. We are confident it will help Portuguese speakers better understand cloud native concepts, and are doing our little part to ease our community’s cloud native journey a definition at a time, and that feels great!
How has the experience been?
It has been really nice to collaborate with people all around the world and discuss the best way to localize terms — we all learn so much through the process. And the fact that the community around the Glossary is so engaged makes it especially fun.
It’s been a huge learning curve for everyone, especially when it comes to creating a safe environment for new contributors to join and contribute. That is really important to us, and we are still working on improving that process.
Additionally, Portuguese is a language with many particularities and expressions. That leads to many team discussions until we find a consensus on how to localize a term best. It’s really interesting to hear people’s different views and interpretations.
Our focus for the future is to improve the pull request review process and make the project more attractive to new contributors. Portuguese speaker, join us if this sounds interesting!
Any lessons learned you’d like to share with the community?
We have learned a lot during the Portuguese localization process, but if we had to choose one lesson, it’s: In an open-source project, the community is everything. Everyone has valuable experiences that will benefit the localization process.
How and why should others contribute
The Glossary is an excellent opportunity to start contributing to open source. You will have a real impact on the careers of people new to cloud native or those struggling to understand these concepts. If you are a (Brazilian) Portuguese speaker and want to learn while contributing to a great project, join the #glossary-localization-portuguese channel on the CNCF slack. We look forward to meeting you! .