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since older versions are no longer maintained once a newer one is released.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.
Sponsor the work
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 [email protected]. 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.
