Authoring multilingual computational scientific narratives

[nthiery]

Because we are teaching in French, we often face the desire and/or need for authoring and maintaining multilingual documents. Our latest use case is sharing introductory programming teaching material between courses delivered in French at bachelor level and in English at master level. From earlier experience with a book Computational Mathematics with SageMath maintaining such a multilingual document by hand over the long run is a lot of work. Basically it's maintaining two forks of a project in sync.

These days, Natural Language Processing, and in particular Adaptive Machine Translation, ought to provide serious assistance. Now the question is to leverage this technology and integrate it into our authoring workflows; particularly in the context of MyST and Jupyter.

I am considering exploring this space this coming Spring, with the help of interns. Here are some notes about the project. If you have experience, pointers or feedback, or if you are interesting in joining, this is most welcome.

And now to a more specific question: we are considering two types of workflows:

1. Asynchronous, based on version control based collaborative authoring workflow.
2. Synchronous, embedded in a real time collaborative authoring environment.

The second one is much more exploratory; at this stage, it's about exploring the design space with an intern having a human computer interaction background. Yet, it's worth choosing a specific collaborative authoring environment as support to think concretely and prototype. Curvenote would be a natural pick.

Have you thought about such features in the road map of Curvenote? Would you be interested in potential outcomes of the project? Would you be willing to provide support and guidance?

Cheers,

[choldgraf]

Just a note that we have an issue tracking multi-lingual content in mystmd here:

• Support multi-language content and pages with translations #1879

I also think it'd be really cool to see curvenote as a collaborative editing space for this, Id also like to to clarify that jupyter book is separate from curvenote.

For questions that are specifically about Curvenote, I'd suggest reaching out to them directly about this rather than via the jupyter book discussion forum. For questions that relate to jupyter book and myst development this is the right place! I would love to see human or financial resources going towards multi lingual content.