A frequent barrier to contributing to open source is the dominance of the English language, reports Jennifer Riggins. “Highly distributed, remote teams rely on asynchronous communication for code, documentation, Slack channels, mailing lists, and more,” which can make contributing difficult for those who don’t speak, read, or write English proficiently.
“Some communities understand this risk to open source sustainability and are making an effort to translate their documentation,” Riggins notes, mainly through volunteer localization efforts. Kubernetes, for example, has localized its core docs into 14 languages, with more in process.
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