Promoting Fortran in non-English languages

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Based on my personal experience, developing countries like China and India still have many professors teaching Fortran at colleges. By contrast, developed countries like the U.S. seem to move forward much faster and have basically abandoned Fortran. Hence, it seems to make more sense to promote Fortran in English languages.

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As far as I know, there are only a few characteristic universities in China that teach Fortran in the Meteorology and Geophysics. But few top universities in China will teach Fortran,
it may be the case that, due to professional needs, the instructor will encourage students to learn Fortran by themselves rather than being taught, one of the reasons being that getting started with Fortran is easy.

At the same time, Chinese Fortran courses mainly stay in Fortran 90/03. Due to the lack of course teaching, students only have a low understanding of Fortran at the university level. Fortran gives students an illusion of being out of touch with modern languages ​​and modern programming. Because students who learn Fortran are often not pure computer science students, the code they write is often unstructured and difficult to maintain, which seems to be seen in Fortran students in any country, the technical learning maturity of Fortran often depends on the initiative of the students, and these Fortran students are likely to stop using Fortran after graduation (can’t find a suitable job).

Personally, I studied ship and ocean engineering at Harbin Engineering University. Our professional technology stack is relatively traditional, and there are many inheritances of Boundary Element Methods (BEM), which often involve complex number arithmetic. Fortran natively supports complex numbers and has good performance. Some students in our major will learn Fortran by themselves, but there are no courses taught; the same ship and ocean engineering of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, they prefer CFD numerical simulation, and they are more self-learning C++ in the laboratory.

From a practical point of view, in addition to the advantages of built-in complex numbers, arrays, and functions, Fortran has relatively rudimentary basic toolsets. Some top universities in China are trying to use C++, Rust and other languages ​​without runtime to replace Fortran. Python, R, and Julia shine in data analysis scenarios, while Fortran is gradually being eroded by C++ in numerical simulation.

Here are some questions and answers on Zhihu (similar to Quora):

  1. Is Fortran still necessary?
  2. What is the experience of programming in Fortran compared to C++?
  3. Is Fortran still the dominant language used in scientific computing?
  4. Why are more and more scientists using Python, Ruby instead of Fortran?
  5. Computational fluid dynamics code, what is the advantage of C++ over Fortran?

In these questions and answers, some users expressed negative opinions, of course, most people affirmed the stable and high performance of Fortran in high-performance computing!

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We just included LFortran’s documentation in our translation project:

Going forward we also want to localize the compiler itself:

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Good news! Compiler messages are sometimes cryptic. Using our mother tongue could be helpful in that case.

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I found translating documents to be a good excuse to take the time for carefully reading them. I catch myself rushing over documents ever so often to pick out selectively the information I think I’m looking for. It also helps to catch typos when translating my own texts.

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But beware! In many languages there are simply no equivalents for many English computer-related terms or concepts. So a forced translation, full of calques or neologisms, might get even more cryptic

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Sure, but as said by @awvwgk, when translating you are obliged to make an effort to fully understand what you read… So a careful translation could also be better than the original.

When translating I sometimes feel I need first to translate the English version into a clearer English version… Translating a project is a more interesting activity than it seems.

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Hi Sebastian,
I have just begun completing the fpm docs French translation and will work later on the fortran-lang.org translation.
Just one question about the PR: are they made automatically by weblate? And at which frequency?

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PRs are opened daily or on request if new translations are available. The PRs are kept up to date with the repository and new translations are automatically committed by weblate.

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@awvwgk Concerning the fpm doc, it seems there is a problem with that paragraph on the main page:

Registry
There are already many packages available for use with fpm, providing an easily accessible and rich ecosystem of general purpose and high-performance code. For a full list of packages checkout the fpm registry. New packages can be submitted to the registry here.

There was already a French translation, but it appears in English on the site https://fpm.fortran-lang.org/
The problem is also present in the other languages: es, pt, cn…

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@awvwgk

In Weblate, there are some strings like:

 	{bdg-link-primary}`Get started <learn/>`

As it seems to be a syntax for a link inside the website, should we translate the content of the quotes? In that case just “Get started” or also “learn”?

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This is a myst-role for a badge with link (Badges, Buttons & Icons — Sphinx Design (alabaster)), the role bdg-link-primary should be preserved as should the link target learn/.

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@awvwgk
The Weblate translations of the Fortran-lang homepage are locked anew:

Probably it is due to the last PR merged one hour ago:

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Should work again now. Going forward we better avoid committing translations in PRs, instead for updating the po-files in the repo the following workflow should be used:

  1. use repository maintenance on weblate to commit changes and push them
  2. merge weblate PR in upstream repository
  3. sync local repository
  4. run python intl.py and commit the changes to default branch
  5. push default branch to upstream
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Thanks Sebastian @awvwgk, it seems complicated to manage translations…

I guess the five steps you listed concerns the Fortran-lang page managers? Concerning translaters, does it change something to the way we should work?

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Yeah, that’s mainly me taking notes. Nothing is going to change for translators, maybe we will observe fewer breakage.

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Thanks sir, I will be patching this in the upcoming PR.

Thanks and Regards,
Henil Shalin Panchal

CC @awvwgk

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Hello. I would like to try of making Russian translation.
I already translated localy index.po file for https://fortran-lang.org several pages: index, learn, learn/quickstart (with it’s subsections). Mainly translation was made with Deepl.com changing some stylish correction and trying to use more common terms I encountered in literature early.

The one of problem is absence of strings for translation within code listings.

I currently not able to transfer translation to Fortran programming language/Fortran webpage @ Hosted Weblate because of fixed list of languages so I’m waiting for addition of new langt to list (request was sent).

P.S.
Quickstart tutorial — Fortran Programming Language refers “Next button” ( Use the Next button at the bottom to start the tutorial with a Hello World example.) but I don’t see any “Next button”.

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Sure thing, I just opened PRs to initialize the files:

Do you know whether there are other Russian speakers here interested in translating or checking translations? We don’t have groups (more than one person) for all languages yet, except for Chinese and Spanish, so this is not a strict requirement, but would be helpful of course.

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