There is a reason large software companies provide free or relatively cheap license for their super-expensive software to students.

When these people finish school and look for a job, they will already know how to use that super-expensive software and not the other one.

So when a company hires them, either they let the person use this super-expensive program they need to train the person to use the other one. Even if the other one is free of charge, the training cost and the time it takes to get up-to-speed in that other tool will mean that most companies will opt for the software that has a larger pool of knowledgeable users.

With programming languages there is a similar effect.





The cross-training cost is very high and it is time consuming.

Perl?

So if you'd like to have a better chance to increase the number of Perl developers, then it is important to make Perl accessible to people at a young age.

For English speakers it is usually not a problem as there are many books and plenty of tutorials out there. Some of them are even recommended.

For non-English speakers it is probably a lot harder. Markets are usually smaller, so fewer publishers will be ready for a translation, and as far as I know, the number of tutorials in other languages is also quite limited.

That's why I am so excited by the help of all the awesome people who translate the Perl Tutorial and many other articles on the Perl Maven site.

The leading languages based on number of pages translated are Simplified Chinese, Portuguese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Italian, and French, but there are articles already in 13 languages, besides my broken English.

Thanks to the translators

I'd like to both thank the translators (who sometimes even fix my articles), and ask for your help.

Help needed

We need people to help translating more articles, proofreading the existing articles and helping the rest of the world find the translations. The simples things you can do is visiting the sites on a regular base, and share the articles with your Google+, Facebook and Twitter followers. Slightly more work is to share the articles with your local Perl Monger group - where the language fits - and asking them to help too.

BTW each translation has its own RSS feed and the meta site has a feed including all the articles to make it easier for you to follow the language you are interested in.

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