Programming Brain now available in Spanish

I’m happy to announce that now the whole website is available en Español!

The translation process

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Translating all the articles I have published wasn’t easy, but also not that difficult thanks to ChatGPT. Yeah, full disclosure there. I used it to get the first drafts in Spanish, but I took every single piece and edited them to improve the quality of the translation, which at times was not so great.

Why ChatGPT and not Google Translate or similar? Because I migrated the blog posts to markdown format. I instructed ChatGPT to translate respecting the markdown syntax, something Google Translate cannot do.

Using ChatGPT to help with translations

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To translate the articles, I used a prompt similar to this:

I want you to translate markdown files to Spanish.
Respect the markdown syntax. Don't translate the header.
Use conversational Latin American Spanish.
Modify the grammar and punctuation accordingly.

To be honest, that last bit on “grammar and punctuation” and even the “Latin American Spanish” instruction didn’t seem to have done much. However, ChatGPT gave me drafts that I could read and easily fix since I’m a native Spanish speaker. It was fun to read my old posts from 2013 when I started blogging in English.

What didn’t work with ChatGPT

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I tried many times to perform a bulk translation by uploading a .zip with all the markdown files in it, It didn’t work. It kept “simulating” a translation instead of actually translating the texts. If you have a prompt or tips to make it work, I’d be interested to know about it.

Conclusion

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This process took many hours of work, but it definitively was worth the effort. Go ahead and switch to your preferred language (English or Spanish). You’ll find the option in the header. I hope you like the content. Happy coding!