Hi all,
I have just managed (in my opinion, and in regard to Object Pascal) to cross the border between "absolute beginner" and "still rather mediocre programmer".
I got great support from both the Englisch and the German community and I am willing to spend some time to pay back to the community. I consider myself fit to go through part of the beginner documentations where I found them not helpful, and try to enhance them so the ones hopefully coming after me have lower barriers to entry. The community has been absolutely great, some members have patiently answered even the most basic questions, but I do not want to stress their patience too much.
I started to make some changes to basic pages like, for instance,
https://wiki.freepascal.org/Networking, because I felt that the information given was, in many aspects, inadequate to guide beginners to success with as little efforts as possible, so they stay on board and feel motivated to dig further.
I am natively a German speaker, but have, from the very beginning of my career, always preferred English documentations, for many [I still think] good reasons, but I know others may have different preferences.
Recently, triggered by an ongoing discussion in the German forum, I have had a closer look at what automatic translators (Google Translate) deliver, and boy, the have, in my opinion, evolved substantially from where they were a couple years ago (most infamous example: MSDN, I'd say ...), at least when it comes to English->German.
I did also check the automatic translation of "my" section of the page above to German and found it acceptable, if not "perfect". I then checked other [entry level] pages and tutorials as well, and found them almost perfect as well, with the errors that were occasionally there in no way misleading into a completely wrong directiopn [as it has regularly been years ago].
Now there is already a German page, many years ago someone started a translation, but quit pretty soon, so the current German page is almost useless. Sure, I could update it, at least the part I have contributed, but having seen what Google Translate delivers, I feel this is a waste of precious time.
I'd like to remove the German page altogether, and/or replace it with a hint to use Google Translate [or any other Translator anyone likes].
What do you think?
Armin