Nickolas's blog

e-maxx translation news + Hacktoberfest = T-shirts!
By Nickolas, 8 years ago, In English

A quick update on the status of e-maxx translation project.

First, I'm excited to announce that I've joined e-maxx in English team as an admin! From practical point of view this means that I can review and accept pull requests and help with the issues arising during the contribution process. Feel free to contact me if you have questions. And if I encounter anything outside of my expertise, I can always ping RodionGork directly :-)

Second, October is a particularly good month for contributions to e-maxx translation, as well as for open source contributions in general. Hacktoberfest is back this year, and they are giving away t-shirts to anyone who makes 4 pull requests to any GitHub-hosted projects between October 1st and 31st.

We don't have an explicit list of issues to work on, but there are two basic kinds of contribution we're looking for:

  1. Translations of articles (obviously :-)).
  2. Practice problems for already translated articles — these are the problems at online judges on which the described algorithm can be practiced. See circle-circle intersection article for an example.

Here is a recent post by RodionGork about technical improvements in contributions process.

So if you have at any point considered contributing to e-maxx translation, now is the time to do it :-)

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Comments Comments (24)
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8 years ago, # |
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great! I have a list of articles which i compiled myself looking forward to contribute :)

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8 years ago, # |
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Doesn't the project have to be one of the featured ones on Hacktoberfest for contributors to be eligible for T-shirts? I can't see this project in the list.

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    from hacktoberfest site:

    Pull requests can be made in any GitHub-hosted repositories/projects

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    No it doesn't. Last year I got my T-shirt for contributions to Apache REEF which was not featured either.

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8 years ago, # |
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Would it be okay to translate articles using a translator service and then correct all of them to correct English on the basis of one's own understanding? Or is it necessary for one to know russian to translate articles?

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    It would be Ok. Some contributors already have used this way. Anyway some other contributors can later improve your translations in separate revisions.

    Just do not forget "to correct them on the basis of one's own understanding" as raw machine translation will be quite awful on these texts :)

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    Just make sure the result describes the correct algorithm, not just that it consists of sentences in proper English :-)

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8 years ago, # |
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With example problems, you should take care that you don't flood the articles with many asking for exactly the same thing. So some that are a direct application of the technique, and some others that require using it in more creative ways.

e-maxx is a very good resource, I'll see if I can help with anything!

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8 years ago, # |
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I am getting wa on pretest 1 . Its working well on my pc Please reply asap

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8 years ago, # |
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I just can't express how thankful I am to Nickolas for becoming admin of this project. Some active and CP-wise person was utterly needed and it is wonderful she have come to help! :)

About this:

I wish you could rectify e-maxx even in Russian

I'm afraid it is not in our powers. e-maxx.ru is a great site, especially when we remember it was created mainly by a single person. Its author e-maxx did wonderful job — but probably nowadays he is busy with many different things. One person couldn't do all work forever.

However we may hope that when translating pages to English, contributors may improve the material based on their experience. Moreover I believe that articles on some topics not existing in original e-maxx.ru could be added (if our admin will approve it).

I also think that if localized versions (in Russian, Chinese, French, Spanish) would be needed, we can later add some functionality to e-maxx-eng to allow storing and rendering such "secondary translations". However for now probably we should concentrate on the main content.

P.S. Upon hints of colleagues, I've tried to fix the problem with rendering in https and added original favicon from e-maxx site. Feel free to report any issues. Except, probably, "I have a great idea of rewriting all the rendering stuff" — let us concentrate on content for now :)

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8 years ago, # |
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So, as I see it shouldn't necessarily be exact translation and it can be even entry on the same topic written in the very different way from original version?

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    I think this should be OK. Just make sure to contact admin beforehand and explain your intention. E.g. "I want to translate this topic, or better rewrite, because it is outdated / incomprehensible etc."

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8 years ago, # |
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That's great news, thanks a lot for all volunteers who work on this project!

From my side, I'll work on open-sourcing the old Russian article sources (at least for those that were written in TeX). Also I'm working on rewriting the site so that it can just take the article sources from github and render them.

BTW, I've recently received approval from my current employer to keep working on this personal project without any requirements on the intellectual property ownership side. Without this, I wouldn't be able to license the updated articles under the license I wanted. TLDR: All articles on the site will continue to be in Public Domain.

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
    ← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +25 Vote: I do not like it

    Also, as many already mentioned, many of the Russian articles themselves need correction. This will be possible after publishing the sources of the existing articles as a Github repo too.

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8 years ago, # |
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Hacktoberfest checker (unofficial) to verify how far away from the T-shirt you are :-)

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    Curious thing. For me it shows "1/4 keep going" :)

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      8 years ago, # ^ |
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      Changes you do to a project directly without a pull request don't count, and neither do pull requests you merge as a maintainer. Keep going :-)

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8 years ago, # |
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One more project which rewards open source contributions year-round: https://codecuriosity.org/

It breaks contributions down into commits and "activities" (issues and comments on pull requests) and tries to estimate how important it is and assign points based on this. Eventually one accumulates points for contributions and can use them to shop in Github store (I have yet to get to that stage :-) )

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8 years ago, # |
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Recently I heard that google translate is updated. Actually it is so nice that I can understand most contents of emaxx with google translate.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=ja&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fe-maxx.ru%2Falgo%2F&edit-text=&act=url

I suggest to auto-translate all contents of emaxx first, add them to https://e-maxx-eng.appspot.com/, and then improve them later.

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    I don't think this is a good idea.

    First, translation quality is not that good. For example (from some pull requests we got) words "vertex", "summit" and "peak" are all valid standalone translations for Russian "вершина", but only one of them should be used in graph context :-)

    Second, Google has ways to detect websites which consist of automatic translations, and such websites can be banned from search results.

    Last, but not least, what is the value of such a website for the reader? Google translate for e-maxx has been available for a long time and is not going anywhere :-) If somebody comes to e-maxx-eng and sees that the articles are just automated translations, they won't come back a month later to see that they'll be improved.

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      8 years ago, # ^ |
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      OK, I agree.

      How about this? Now those who can't understand Russian can understand e-maxx using google translate. While they are reading the articles (for the purpose of their training rather than volunteer), they can spot and fix some mistakes without huge effort. Is the auto-translation corrected by a human worth posting?

      Personally, I'm interested in translating Hungarian method or Suffix automaton — I can't find good resources for these things in English and still I don't understand them very well. Now I can read e-maxx and I can post translations when I have time. This way the quality of translations may reduce a little bit but it can be much faster to complete the translation. Do you want that?

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        8 years ago, # ^ |
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        As long as the auto-translation corrected by human looks like proper English, it's fine :-)

        You can always send a pull request, and one of maintainers will review it and suggest improvements.

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8 years ago, # |
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Anyone got his/her t-shirt?

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