How our approach to translation considers design, process and people

English is seen by many as the language of computing, and in many countries, it’s also either the language of education or a language that young people aspire to learn. However, English is, in some instances, a barrier to learning: young people in many communities don’t have enough knowledge of English to use it to learn about digital technologies, or even if they do, the language of communication with other students, teachers, or volunteers may not be English.

In a world where browsers can instantly translate web pages and large language models can power seemingly perfect conversations in virtually any language, it’s easy to assume that translation just happens and that somehow, technology takes care of it. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Technology is certainly crucial to translation, but there’s much more to it than that. Our approach to translation involves considering design, process, and people to ensure that localised materials truly help young people with their learning journey. 

Localisation or translation?

Localisation and translation are similar terms that are often used interchangeably. Localisation normally refers to adapting a product to suit a local market, whereas translation is a subset of localisation that involves changing the language of the text. For instance, localisation includes currencies, measurements, formatting dates and numbers, and contextual references. Meanwhile, translation involves only changing the language of the text, such as from English to French.

At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we see translation as an enabler. It enables volunteers to reach learners, learners to succeed in their educational goals, and the Foundation to achieve its mission all over the world.

Four key ways the Foundation maximises the impact and reach of our translated materials

1. Create with localisation in mind

Regardless of whether learning materials are intended for English-speaking or global audiences, it’s important to create and design them with localisation in mind. That way, they can be used in a variety of places, and any piece of content (text, graphics, or illustrations) can be modified to meet the needs of the target audience. Keeping localisation in mind might include allowing space for text expansion, being mindful of any text embedded in graphic elements, and even making sure the context is understandable for a variety of audiences. Making a piece of content localisable at the creation stage is virtually cost-free. Modifying fully built assets to translate them or to use them in other markets can be expensive and extremely time-consuming!

2. Always have user needs and priorities upfront

Before investing in localising or translating any materials, we seek to understand the needs and priorities of our users. In many countries where English is not the usual language of communication, materials in English are a barrier, even if some of the users have a working knowledge of English. Making materials available in local languages directly results in additional reach and enhanced learning outcomes. In other communities where English has a certain status, a more selective approach may be more appropriate. A full translation may not be expected, but translating or adapting elements within them, such as introductions, videos, infographics, or glossaries, can help engage new learners.

3. Maximise the use of technology

While it’s possible to translate with pen and paper, translation is only scalable with the use of technology. Computer-assisted translation tools, translation memories, terminology databases, machine translation, large language models, and so on are all technologies that play their part in making the translation process more efficient and scalable. 

At the Foundation, we make use of a variety of translation technologies and also, crucially, work very closely with our content and development teams to integrate their tools and processes into the overall localisation workflow. 

4. Take great care of the people

Even with the best technology and the smoothest integrations, there is a human element that is absolutely essential. Our amazing community of volunteers and partners work very closely with learners in their communities. They understand the needs of those learners and have a wealth of information and insights. We work with them to prioritise, translate, review and test the learning materials. They are key to ensuring that our learning materials help our users reach their learning goals.

In summary

Thinking about localisation from the moment we start creating learning materials, understanding the needs of users when creating our end goals, maximising the use of technology, and taking good care of our people and partners are the key principles that drive our translation effort. 

If you’d like to find out more about translation at the Raspberry Pi Foundation or would like to contribute to the translation of our learning materials, feel free to contact us at translation@raspberrypi.org.  

A version of this article also appears in Hello World issue 23.

The post Translating educational content: four key principles appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

At the Clubs Conference, volunteers and educators came together to celebrate their achievements and explore new ways to support young people to create with technology. The event included community display tables, interactive workshops, discussions, and talks.

For everyone who couldn’t join us in person, we recorded all of the talks that community members gave on the main stage. Here’s what you can learn from the speakers.

Running your club

• Jane Waite from our team offered a taste of the research we do and how you can get insights from it to help you run your own coding club. Watch Jane’s talk to learn about the research that informs our projects for your club.
• Rhodri Smith, who runs a Code Club, shared how you can use assistive technologies to open your club experience to more young people. Watch Rhodri’s talk for some fantastic tips on how assistive technology can make Code Club accessible to children of all ages and abilities.

• Dave Morley, who volunteers at the CoderDojo at Royal Museums Greenwich, presented his way of using Scratch projects to keep engaging Dojo participants. Watch Dave’s talk for tips on how to create your own coding projects for young people.
• Tim Duffey, who is part of the West Sound CoderDojo, shared how his Dojo ran successful online sessions during the coronavirus pandemic. Watch Tim’s talk for great advice on how to run successful coding clubs for young people online.
• Steph Burton from our team presented new resources we’re working on to help clubs recruit and train volunteers. Watch Steph’s talk for tips on how to recruit new volunteers for your coding club.

Engaging young people in your club

• Sophie Hudson, who runs a Code Club in rural Yorkshire, told us how her school’s Code Club turned taking part in Astro Pi Mission Zero into a cross-curricular activity, and how she partnered older learners with younger ones for peer mentoring that engaged new learners in coding. Watch Sophie’s talk to learn how you can get your school involved in Astro Pi, especially if you don’t have much adult support available.

• Helen Gardner from our team shared how you can motivate and inspire your coders by supporting them to share their projects in the Coolest Projects showcase — even their very first Scratch animation. Watch Helen’s talk if you’re looking for something new for your club.

The benefits of Code Club and CoderDojo for your community

• Fiona Lindsay, who leads a Code Club, presented her insights into the skills beyond coding that young people learn at Code Club, and she shared some wonderful videos of her coders talking about their experience. Watch Fiona’s talk to hear young girls talk about how to get more girls into coding, and for evidence of why every school should have a Code Club.

• Bruce Harms, who is involved in AruCoderDojo, shared how he and his team are making the CoderDojo model part of their wider work to bring digital skills and infrastructure to Aruba. Watch Bruce’s talk to learn how his team has tailored their coding clubs for their local community.

What is volunteering for CoderDojo and Code Club like?

• Marcus Davage, who volunteers at a Code Club, shared his journey as a volunteer translator of our resources, and how he engaged colleagues at his workplace in also supporting translations to make coding skills available to more young people across the world. Watch Marcus’s talk if you speak more than one language.
• To end the day, we hosted a group of community members onstage to have a chat about their journeys with CoderDojo and Code Club, what they’ve learned, and how they see the future of their clubs. Watch the panel conversation if you want inspiration and advice for getting involved in helping kids create with tech.

Thank you to everyone who gave talks, ran workshops, presented posters, and had conversations to share their questions and insights. It was wonderful to meet all of you, and we came away from the Clubs Conference feeling super inspired by the amazing work Code Club and CoderDojo volunteers all over the world do to help young people learn to create with digital technologies.

We learned so much from listening to you, and we will take the lessons into our work to support you and your clubs in the best way we can.

The post Clubs Conference 2023: Ideas and tools for CoderDojos and Code Clubs appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Today we’re introducing you to Nadia from Maysan, Iraq. Nadia’s achievements speak for themselves, and we encourage you to watch her video to see some of the remarkable things she has accomplished.

Say hello to Nadia

Nadia’s journey with the Raspberry Pi Foundation started when she moved to England to pursue a PhD at Brunel University. As an international student, she wanted to find a way to be part of the local community and make the most of her time abroad. Through her university’s volunteer department, she was introduced to Code Club and began supporting club sessions for children in her local library. The opportunity to share her personal passion for all things computer science and coding with young people felt like the perfect fit.

“[Code Club] added to my skills. And at the same time, I was able to share my expertise with the young children and to learn from them as well.”

Nadia Al-Aboody

Soon, Nadia saw that the skills young people learned at her Code Club weren’t just technical, but included team building and communication as well. That’s when she realised she needed to take Code Club with her when she moved back home to Iraq.

A Code Club in every school in Iraq

With personal awareness of just how important it is to encourage girls to engage with computing and digital technologies, Nadia set about training the Code Club network’s first female-only training team. Her group of 15 trainers now runs nine clubs — and counting— throughout Iraq, with their goal being to open a club in every single school in the country.

Reaching new areas can be a challenge, one that Nadia is addressing by using Code Club resources offline:

“Not every child has a smartphone or a device, and that was one of the biggest challenges. The [Raspberry Pi] Foundation also introduced the unplugged activities, which was amazing. It was very important to us because we can teach computer science without the need for a computer or a smart device.”

Nadia Al-Aboody

Nadia also works with a team of other volunteers to translate our free resources related to Code Club and other initiatives for young people into Arabic, making them accessible to many more young people around the world.

Tamasin Greenough Graham, Head of Code Club here at the Foundation, shares just how important volunteers like Nadia are in actively pushing our shared mission forwards.

“Volunteers like Nadia really show us why we do the work we do. Our Code Club team exists to support volunteers who are out there on the ground, making a real difference to young people. Nadia is a true champion for Code Club, and goes out of her way to help give more children access to learning about computing. By translating resources, alongside overseeing a growing network of clubs, she helps to support more volunteers and, in turn, reach more young people. Having Nadia as a member of the community is really valuable.”

Tamasin Greenough Graham, Head of Code Club

If you are interested in becoming a Code Club volunteer, visit codeclub.org for all the information you need to get started.

Help us celebrate Nadia and her commendable commitment to growing the Code Club community in Iraq by sharing her story on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

The post Celebrating the community: Nadia appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Most of this translation work was completed by an amazing community of volunteer translators. In 2021 alone, learners engaged in more than 570,000 learning experiences in languages other than English using our projects.

So how do we know it’s important to put in the effort to make our projects available in many different languages? Various studies show that learning in one’s first language leads to better educational and social outcomes. 

Improved access and attainment for girls

Education policy specialists Chloe O’Gara and Nancy Kendall describe in a USAID-funded guide document (1996, p. 100) that girls living in multilingual communities are less likely to know the official language of school instruction than boys, because girls’ lives tend to be more restricted to home and family, where they have fewer opportunities to become proficient in a second language. These restrictions limit their access to education, and if they go to school, they are more likely to have a limited understanding of the dominant language, and therefore learn less. Observations in research studies (Hovens, 2002; Benson 2002a, 2002b) suggest that making education available in a local language greatly increases female students’ opportunities for educational access and attainment.

Improved self-efficacy

Research studies conducted in Guinea and Senegal (Clemons & Yerende, 2009) suggest that education in a local language, which is more likely to focus on the learner’s circumstances, community, and learning and development needs, increases the learner’s belief in their abilities and skills, compared to education in a dominant language.

Improved test scores

Learning in a language other than one’s own has a negative effect on learning outcomes, especially for learners living in poverty. For example, a UNESCO-funded case study in Honduras showed that 94% of pupils learned reading skills if their home language was the same as the language of assessment. In contrast, among pupils who spoke a different language at home, this proportion dropped to 62%. Similarly, a UNESCO-funded case study in Guatemala showed that when students were able to learn in a bilingual environment, attendance and promotion rates increased, while rates of repetition and dropout rates decreased. Moreover, students attained higher scores in all subjects and skills, including the mastery of the dominant language (UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report, Policy Paper 24, February 2016).

Improved acquisition of programming concepts

A survey conducted by a researcher from the University of California San Diego showed that non-native English speakers found it challenging to learn programming languages when the majority of instructional materials and technical communications were only available in English (Guo, 2018). Moreover, a computing education research study of the association between local language use and the rate at which young people learn to program showed that beginners who learned to program in a programming language with keywords and environment localised into their primary language demonstrated new programming concepts at a faster rate, compared with beginners from the same language group who learned using a programming interface in English (Dasgupta & Hill, 2017).

You can help with translations and empower young people

It is clear from these studies that in order to achieve the most impact and to benefit disadvantaged and underserved communities, educational initiatives must work to make learning resources available in the language that learners are most familiar with.

By translating our learning resources, we not only support people who have English as a second language, we also make the resources useful for people who don’t speak any English — estimated as four out of every five people on Earth.

If you’re interested in helping us translate our learning resources, which are completely free, you can find out more at rpf.io/translate.

The post Why we translate our free online projects for young people to learn coding appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Support and engagement for Welsh Code Clubs

Sarah introduced herself to the Welsh education community by running a Code Club training workshop for teachers. Educators from 32 Welsh schools joined her to learn how to start their own Code Club and then tried one of the free coding projects we provide for club sessions for themselves.

The Welsh Code Club network had a chance to meet Sarah at a country-wide online codealong on 11 March, just in time to kick off British Science Week 2022. In this one-hour codealong event, we took beginner coders through the first project of our new ‘Introduction to Scratch’ pathway, Space Talk. Space Talk is a fantastic project for Code Clubs: it provides beginners with a simple introduction to coding in Scratch, and also gives plenty of opportunity for more experienced learners to get creative and make the project their own.

The codealong was fantastically popular, with 90 teachers and 2900 learners from 59 schools participating. Several of the schools shared their excitement with us on Twitter, posting pictures and videos of their Space Talk projects.

Tamasin Greenough Graham, Head of Code Club, says: “It was wonderful to see so many children and teachers from Wales coding with us. I really loved the creativity they showed in all their projects!”

Welsh translations of Code Club learning materials

Although the codealong took place in English, Space Talk and the whole ‘Introduction to Scratch’ pathway are available in the Welsh language. The pathway includes a total of six projects, bringing the total number of Welsh-language coding projects we offer to 37. It’s really important to us to offer our learning materials in Welsh, especially because we know it helps young people engage with our free coding activities.

The translation of learning materials is a collaborative effort at the Raspberry Pi Foundation: we work with a team of 1465 volunteer translators, who translate our materials into  33 languages, making them accessible for more children and educators around the world.

Two of these translators, Marcus and Julia Davage, are based in Wales. They help to make our projects accessible to Welsh-speaking learners. Marcus and Julia have been part of the community for 6 years, volunteering at Code Club and running their own club:

“I started volunteering for Code Club in 2016 when my daughter was in a Welsh-medium primary school and her teacher had started a Code Club. This lasted until 2019. Last year I started my own Code Club at the Welsh-medium primary school at which my wife Julia teaches. Since helping out, she has taught Scratch in her own lessons!”

– Marcus Davage, Code Club volunteer & Welsh translation volunteer

Marcus and Julia have translated numerous learning resources and communications for our Welsh community. Marcus describes the experience of translating:

“I noticed that several of the projects hadn’t been completely translated into Welsh, so when my company, BMC Software, promoted a Volunteering Day for all of its staff, I jumped at the opportunity to spend the whole day finishing off many of the missing translations! I must admit, I did laugh at a few terms, like ’emoji’ (which has no official translation), ’emoticon’ (‘gwenoglun’ or ‘smiley face’), and ‘wearable tech’ (‘technoleg gwisgadwy’).”

– Marcus Davage, Code Club volunteer & Welsh translation volunteer

We’re thankful to Marcus and Julia and to all the teachers and volunteers in Wales who bring coding skills to the young people in their schools.

Get involved in Code Club, in Wales or elsewhere

Keen readers may have noticed that this year marks the tenth anniversary of Code Club! We have lots of celebrations planned for the worldwide community of volunteers and learners, in long-running clubs as well as in brand-new ones.

So now is an especially great time to get involved by starting a Code Club at your school, or by signing up to volunteer at an up-and-running club. Find out more at codeclub.org.

And if you’re interested in learning more about Code Club in Wales, email us at support@codeclub.org so Sarah can get in touch.

The post Code Club in Wales with translations, teacher training and a country-wide codealong appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Our translators

The #RPiTranslate community is growing every day, and at the moment we have around 370 volunteers. They are translating our learning projects into 50 languages – everything from Afrikaans, to Tamil, to Scots Gaelic! Projects in 26 of those languages are already available on the Raspberry Pi learning projects website, and we continually add more.

Our translators are all volunteers, and they come from various walks of life. They are students and professionals, translators and coders, young and retired, already passionate about our mission or completely new to it.

Abdulaziz is a language coordinator for the Arabic language team. He is finishing his doctoral research at the University of Toledo in the US, and will soon start working as an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at King Saud University in Saudi Arabia. He translates for us because he believes our educational resources are great and he’d love to see them used by Arabic speakers of all ages.

Wojtek volunteers at a Code Club in Poland, and helps us translate our projects into Polish because he thinks translations are crucial for learning. When children can access lessons in their native language, they truly understand programming concepts, and that empowers them to experiment and create more.

Cor is the main force behind all of our Dutch projects. He is a retired simulator designer and developer for the Royal Netherlands Air Force, and volunteers at a hackerspace in the Netherlands. While teaching young people coding and robotics, he realised how difficult it is for them to learn all of this in English. He decided to translate for us to change that.

Silvia started volunteering for us when she was studying for a degree in translation. She joined us to gain some real-life experience in translation and localisation, but quickly found herself immersed in our amazing community and became passionate about Raspberry Pi’s mission. She is still supporting us now, even though she has finished her degree and is working full-time.

Sanneke is a digital literacy consultant and librarian at Bibliotheek Kennemerwaard in the Netherlands. She runs five Dojos in the area where her library is based. Sanneke translates because it helps children who want to learn to code. English is taught from quite an early age at primary schools in the Netherlands, but having learning resources in Dutch is particularly helpful for young children.

All of these volunteers bring with them a unique set of skills and experiences. They make the #RPiTranslate community an amazing, diverse, successful team.

Raspberry Pi translators: we salute every single one of you. We couldn’t do what we do without you!

Join us

Anyone can join this amazing group of people in their translation efforts. It’s really easy to get involved: you don’t need any experience of translation or coding, and you can choose how much time you want to commit.

Visit our translation page to find out more, or join one of our live Q&A sessions this week to ask our translation manager and language coordinators anything you’d like:

• Wednesday 26 September at 18:00 BST – join here
• Friday 28 September at 13:00 BST – join here

Happy translation week!

Special thanks to the Atlassian Foundation and MIT Solve for their continued support in developing our translation community.

The post Celebrating our translators! appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.