A few days ago I announced the Symfony 8.1 edition of "The Fast Track", and then that it was available in nine languages. The book has always been free to read online at symfony.com/book. What changes today is not what you can read, but what you can do: the content is now public on GitHub at symfony/the-fast-track, and contributing is open to everyone.

For years, the book lived behind closed doors. Translations happened in a dedicated, closed application where only a handful of approved translators could work, one language at a time. It served us well, but it also meant that if you spotted a typo, an awkward sentence, or a paragraph that had aged badly, there was no simple way for you to fix it. That era is over: the content is now in a regular Git repository, and anyone can open a pull request.

Ten languages, and counting

Besides the English source, the book is available in French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Dutch, Polish, and Ukrainian. And there is a newcomer that arrived too late for the nine-languages announcement: Spanish, our brand-new tenth language.

How you can contribute

We welcome contributions, but a few rules keep the book consistent and reviewable across every language; read the contribution guidelines before opening a pull request.

All contributions must target the latest book version, since older versions are no longer maintained once a newer one is released.

Here is what is most useful:

  • Improving translations: tweaking and polishing existing translations is exactly what we are looking for. Only contribute to a language if you are a native speaker; a translation change is merged only after a few approvals from other native speakers.
  • Improving the English text: improving the English source is welcome too, like any other language.
  • Fixing bugs: fixing bugs in the content is welcome. Code changes are harder for contributors to make, so please open an issue to discuss them first.

And a few things we do not accept by default:

  • New translation languages: we only maintain the existing ones. Exceptions are possible, but must be validated in a ticket after discussion.
  • Content changes: changing the content or adding new chapters is not allowed. If you have an idea, open an issue to discuss it.
  • LLM contributions: these are not allowed by default, in particular automated translations.

Three translations waiting for native speakers

There are three open pull requests for new translations: Persian (fa), Arabic (ar), and Simplified Chinese (zh_CN). These languages existed for the 5.x edition but were never carried forward. To revive them, I started from the 5.x translation and used an LLM to bring it up to the 8.1 content. That is a fast way to get a draft, but it is exactly the kind of automated work the contribution rules forbid by default: an LLM has no idea whether the result reads naturally to a native speaker. So I will not merge these pull requests until native speakers have validated that the content is correct.

If you are a native speaker of one of these languages, your review would be invaluable. Head over to the open pull requests on symfony/the-fast-track and help us get these translations right.

Translating a book this size, keeping every language in sync edition after edition, and running the whole thing as an executable test suite is real, continuous work, and it has to be funded somehow. If your company builds on Symfony and wants to give back, you can sponsor the work on the book directly: reach out to Hadrien at events@symfony.com. Your name in the credits, the book in more hands, more time funded for Symfony. Everybody wins.

License

The book content, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Published in #Community #Documentation #Symfony #Tutorials