Michal Čihař: Translating Sphinx documentation
Few days ago, I've started writing Odorik module to manipulate with API of one Czech mobile network operator. As usual, the code comes with documentation written in English. Given that vast majority of users are Czech, it sounds useful to have in Czech language as well.
The documentation itself is written in Sphinx and built using Read the Docs. Using those to translate the documentation is quite easy.
First step is to add necessary configuration to the Sphinx project as described in their Internationalization Quick Guide. It's matter of few configuration directives and invoking of sphinx-intl and the result can be like this commit.
Once the code in repository is ready, you can start building translated documentation on the Read the docs. There is nice guide for that as well. All you need to do is to create another project, set it's language and link it from master project as translation.
The last step is to find some translators to actually translate the document. For me the obvious choice was using Weblate, so the translation is now on Hosted Weblate. The mass import of several po files can be done by import_project management command.
And thanks to all these you can now read Czech documentation for python Odorik module.
Filed under: Coding English Odorik Weblate 0 comments
I wrote well over one year ago about 
The other day I received from my Japanese teacher an interesting article by Yamazaki Masakazu 
The author describes his feelings and thoughts about the shishiodoshi, in particular connects human life (stress and relieve, cycles), the flow of time, and some other concepts with the shishiodoshi. Up to here it is a wonderful article providing interesting insights into the way the author thinks. Unfortunately, then the author tries to underline his ideas by comparing the Japanese shishiodoshi with European style water fountains, describing the former with all favorable properties and full of deep meaning, while the latter is qualified as beautiful and nice, but bare of any deeper meaning.
I don t go into details that the whole comparison is anyway a bad one, as he is comparing Baroque style fountains, a very limited period, and furthermore ignores the fact that water fountains are not genuinely European (isn t there one in the Kenrokuen, one of the three most famous gardens in Japan!?), nor does he consider any other water-installation that might be available. What really destroys the in principle very nice article is the tone:
The general tone of the article then can be summarized into: The shishiodoshi is rich on meaning, connects to the life of humans, instigates philosophical reflections, represents nature, the flow of time etc. The water fountain is beautiful and gorgeous, but that is all.
I don t think that this separation, or this negative undertone, was created on purpose by the author. A person of his stature is supposedly above this level of primitive comparison. I believe that it is nothing else but a consequence of upbringing and the general attitude that permeates the whole society with this feeling of separateness.
Us and They
Repeatedly providing sentences like Japanese people and Western people have different tastes.. ( ). About 10 times in this short article expressions like Japanese and Westerner appear, leaving the reader with a bitter taste of an author that considers first the Japanese a people (what about Ainu, Ryukyu, etc?), and second that the Japanese are exclusive in the sense that they are set apart from the rest of the world in their way of thinking, living, being.
What puzzles me is that this is not only a singular opinion, but a very general straight in the Japanese media, TV, radio, newspaper, books. Everyone considers Japan and Japanese as something that is fundamentally and profoundly different from everyone else in the world.
There is We the Japanese (and that doesn t mean nationality of passport, but blood line!), and there are They the Rest or, as the way of writing and and description on many occasion suggestions, They the Barbarians .
A short anecdote will underly this: One of the favorite TV talk show / pseudo-documentary style is about Japanese living abroad. That day a lady married in Paris was interviewed. What followed was a guided tour through Paris showing: Dirt in the gutter, street cleaning cars, waste disposal places. Yes, that was all. Just about the dirt . Of course, at length the (unfortunately only apparent) cleanliness of Japanese cities and neighborhoods are mentioned and shown to remind everyone how wonderful Japan is and how dirty the Barbarians. I don t want to say that I consider Japan more dirty than most other countries just the visible part is clean, the moment you step a bit aside and around the corner, there are the worst trash just thrown away without consideration. Anyway.
To return to the topic of Us and They I consider us all humans, first and foremost, and nationality, birthplace, and all that are just by chance. I do NOT reject cultural differences, they are here, of course. But cultural differences are one thing, separating one self and one s perceived people from the rest of the world is another.
Conclusion
I repeat, I don t think that the author had any ill intentions, but it would have been nicer if the article wouldn t make such a stark distinction. He could have written about Shishiodoshi and water fountains without using the Us They categorization. He could have compared other water installations, could have discussed the long tradition of small ponds in European gardens, just to name a few things. But the author choose to highlight differences instead of commonalities.
It is the Us against Them feeling that often makes life in Japan for a foreigner difficult. Japanese are not special, Austrians, too, are not special, nor are Americans, Russians, Tibetans, or any other nationality. No nationality is special, we are all humans. Maybe at some point this will arrive also in the Japanese society and thinking.
Today I feel more special than I have ever felt.
Or... Well, or something like that.
Thing is, there is no clear adjective for this But I successfully finished my Specialization degree! Yes, believe it or not, today I can formally say I am 
Like 
Like 
I got an email last year pointing out a cosmetic issue with
changelogs.debian.net. I think at the time of the email, the only problem was
some bitrot in PHP's built-in server variables making some text appear
incorrectly.
I duly added something to my TODO list to fix it, and it subsequently sat there
for like 13 months. In the ensuing time, Debian changed some stuff, and my code
started incorrectly handling a 302 as well, which actually broke it good and
proper.
I finally got around to fixing it.
I also fixed a problem where sometimes there can be multiple entries in the
Sources file for a package (switching to using
api.ftp-master.debian.org would also address this), which caused
sometimes caused an incorrect version of the changelog to be returned.
In the resulting tinkering, I learned about 
What happened about the 
Lately, I have been dedicating a lot of my time (well, at least compared to
what I used to) to Free Software projects. In particular, I have spent a
moderate amount of time with two projects written in Python.
In this post, I want to talk about the first, more popular project is called
If you like the project, 
A while ago, I switched from 
(This came up in a 
