🇫🇷 🥖 French Translation

[julien-blanchon]

Hi, this issues is dedicate to discuss and organize the work for the french translation of the d2l book.

I started a french translation off the book this morning, using a custom api for DeepL.
The whole book as already been process thought DeepL, but there are still many inconsistencies and language problem.

Everything is compiling fine on my computer but some page are still in English (DeepL may have failed on them, I will translate them manually).
I will in the following day manually read and fix inconsistencies and typo I see. And try my best to match as much as I can with usual and common technical translation in french. Especially a lot of technical English words have been translated but should not be, as the english term is the commonly use even in French.

I will take advantage of this rereading to give you a feedback and try to add some illustrations

PS: Currently I'm hosting this on my repo (https://github.com/julien-blanchon/d2l-fr/tree/french). Would it be possible to add me to the organization so that I can work directly on a d2l-fr branch with you.

Cheers, Julien !

[julien-blanchon]

[julien-blanchon]

I made the choice to "allign" the French translation as the English one. So it will be easier to track and update change in the future with diff. I also translate Figure text et latex link work (such as 'and' or 'or').

I'm actually seeking for French speaking people to read the book and fix typo.
Currently it compile well but I don't have anywhere to host the HTML version. By the way, I have disable the notebook export and execution, I'm mainly focusing on translation currently but if someone is available to show me how to use d2l compiler, I will appreciate.

So if you are french speaking come to the repo and take 10 minutes to check a page ;)

[julien-blanchon]

https://github.com/julien-blanchon/d2l-fr/blob/french/CHECK.md is keeping track of the translation (/verification) progress

[julien-blanchon]

Thanks @astonzhang @AnirudhDagar, please let how do you want to proceed. Feel free to send me a message (Twitter or any where you can find me) if needed.

The entire book is now fairly well translated in French. There are still some typos here and there but nothing too serious. My methodology is pretty reproducible, so far DeepL doesn't work well with markdown but my script does a sufficient job to make it work. 2-3h of post-processing work is enough to have good results. If needed I can help with translation in other languages (I speak Spanish too). Don't hesitate to contact me in this case .

I will also try to draft a note on self-supervised learning soon.

For the moment I stopped improving the French translation until I get to compile it properly (with notebooks ...). It will greatly facilitate a collaborative proofreading to have the documents well formatted in HTML and eventually published somewhere.

[AnirudhDagar]

Hi @julien-blanchon, thanks for your interest in the project, lovely to see the french translation. We use Amazon Translate to generate the base machine translations (see d2lbook) and then with the help of native speakers (translation authors/scientists) we try to maintain the translation. Eg https://github.com/d2l-ai/d2l-zh

As for French, even though it is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, I'm not sure if it is in the d2l translation pipeline yet. I'm guessing not many french speaking students, engineers, and scientists are interested in reading a deep learning book in french, and I'm assuming (might be wrong) that most of them learn deep learning in English, hence it is not the highest priority translation as of now. Maybe @astonzhang can shed some more light on the topic.

You could still help us out with other contributions to d2l-en if you are interested. For example addition of JAX code in d2l and PyTorch code in recommender systems. Let me know, I'd be happy to guide you.

[julien-blanchon]

Hi @AnirudhDagar, thanks for you response. Actually, I consider the French version quite useful . I may be wrong but it seems to me that for a deployment on fr.d2l.ai it only remains to add the French version in your Jenkins pipeline.

It seems to me that some translations are still missing for the korean and vietnamese versions. The current French version is quite complete and update, it's a shame not to publish it.

Most French researchers and students read English well so a French version is not a priority in this respect. However, for academic use it is important to have a French version for most institutions (for equity between students).
I personally hope that this French version would allow a better integration of this book in French (and French speaking, from Belgium to Africa) engineering schools (as Stanford already does for example).

Anyway, if you need people to integrate this version or to maintain a new one, let me know

[AnirudhDagar]

I don't think hosting it on fr.d2l.ai and adding it to our CI should be a problem, and we'd love to support as many languages as possible. I guess it all boils down to the french speaking community's request and demand for the translation. @astonzhang please share your thoughts.

The current French version is quite complete.

Sorry for my question here, I can't read French. Currently, does the repo have machine translations from DeepL? Have you already manually revised the machine translation?

It seems to me that some translations are still missing for the korean and vietnamese versions.

Yes that is true, we only publish chapters that have been revised by translation authors, since machine translation is not up to the mark as of today.

[julien-blanchon]

I don't think hosting it on fr.d2l.ai and adding it to our CI should be a problem, and we'd love to support as many languages as possible. I guess it all boils down to the french speaking community's request and demand for the translation. @astonzhang please share your thoughts.

Great ! And then there is a good chance that a better academic integration can help to improve the project ;)

Sorry for my question here, I can't read French. Currently, does the repo have machine translations from DeepL? Have you already manually revised the machine translation?

The backbone of the translation comes from deepl, being a native french speaker it is very impressive and smooth to read.
I have started to proofread the book manually but it will take some time. There are not necessarily many errors but rather technical terms that should not be translated. So basically we have to find them and replace them. I will continue to work on the French version in the long run (as well as the continuous update).

[astonzhang]

Thanks Julien! It's certainly great to have a French version. Compiling and hosting are usually not an issue. Since D2L keeps being updated, it's more important to figure out which stable version to be translated.

To share a bit of our roadmap: currently we are still heavily revising on the master branch. Most of the other translations (e.g.,. Chinese, Turkish) are based on the more stable (although slightly outdated) r0.17 branch. We expect to release 1.0.0.alpha (then Chapter 2--8 is relatively stable) within 2 weeks and 1.0.0.beta (then at least Chapter 1--11 is stable) around end of August.

So, if you continue to translate based on the current master branch, you'll probably have to keep syncing with the latest heavy edits from us: this can be less efficient. If your repo is mostly from DeepL translator, would you like to hold on until 1.0.0.alpha is released? Then @AnirudhDagar could help set up a d2l-fr repo with machine translations for Chapter 2--8 so you could revise? Once 1.0.0.beta is released, we could add more translations for other stable chapters.

Please let us know what you think. Thanks!

[julien-blanchon]

Thanks ! I didn't know that you were currently revising the book. I thought the current version would be stable for the most part. I now understand why you are hesitating to put too much work into it.

If your repo is mostly from DeepL translator, would you like to hold on until 1.0.0.alpha is released?

It's fine for me, the previous work could always be used as a comparison for Chapter 2--8 of 1.0.0.alpha. I will keep track of your advancement so I can get to proofread it when the 1.0.0.alpha french machine translation will be release. And then the 1.0.0-beta as they will be release too.

Thank you very much for your contribution to open source !
I am waiting for your feedback on a d2l-fr branch when the 1.0.0.alpha will be out 👍

[julien-blanchon]

Any news for a french repo ?

[AnirudhDagar]

Hi @julien-blanchon, thanks for the reminder, yes we released the alpha v1 recently. I can setup the d2l-fr machine translations repo early next week if it is good with @astonzhang?

[marshallexperiment]

Sorry for the late party, but is there any guidelines for translation effort for other language as well? @astonzhang @AnirudhDagar