Brazilian Portuguese JDK API and Guide Translation Project

Last week at the Sun Tech Days in Brazil Jeff Jackson announced the Brazilian Portuguese Translation project (see https://jdk5-api-pt-br.dev.java.net/). This project is a joint project between the Java Users Group and the JDK Community and quite possibly represents the first time when two java.net communities have worked so closely together on one project. It also represents the first time that translation will be done entirely by community participation.

Interest in the project at the conference was evident when 144 developers signed Translation Contributor Agreements. But this is a very large project in need of translators, reviewers and administrators. If you are proficient in Portuguese you are encouraged to participate in the project. The more translators and reviewers the faster the project will finish.

This project is a perfect for the beginning and expert Java developer. For the beginner it is an opportunity to learn the Java API. To me it is almost like taking notes for a class as the translator interprets the documentation for the Portuguese docs. For the experienced user there is an opportunity to translate APIs that are not very familiar and to review translations in their area of expertise.

To simplify the translation process a preprocess doclet has been run on the Java Standard Edition source code to extract the documentation comments into separate comment (.cmnt) files. Each class or nested class is saved to a separate comment file. Once you understand the comment file you can do a translation pretty quickly. In fact yesterday Reginaldo Russinholi translated the first two class in java.applet.

I really encourage all Brazilian Portuguese, and Portuguese speakers to participate in the project. In the end Java will be more accessible to more developers in the native Portuguese language. Should you have any question please contact me, Bruno or the project leaders Ian Hardie (Sun) or Flávio Bianchi.