Django ORM Cookbook Translation Retrospective

The 8Percent study group's efforts to learn Django more deeply and apply it directly to work led further. The members decided to study the Django ORM Cookbook together and attempted to contribute by translating the open-source documentation into Korean and sharing it.

We emailed the original author expressing our intent to participate in translation, and received a positive reply right away. The author suggested trying Sphinx and Read the Docs, and said to reach out anytime if needed.

The documentation build process proceeded in the following order:

• Fork the repository, then create a project on readthedocs.org
• Connect GitHub and select the forked repository
• Modify the project name so it doesn't overlap with the original
• Check the webhook so that push and PR changes are automatically reflected
• Submit the translation PR, merge into master, and confirm the site reflects the changes

Locally, we cloned the forked repository, created a virtual environment, and installed Sphinx to attempt a build. To resolve an error requiring sphinx_rtd_theme, we additionally installed the theme, and then confirmed the HTML build with sphinx-build . ./_build/html/.

We also proceeded with PDF conversion. We generated the PDF via LaTeX, and since it was a Korean document, we also applied kotex and babel-related fixes to DjangoORMCookbook.tex. We then generated the final PDF with make all-pdf.

The translation proceeded with separate presenters and translators assigned per chapter, and in the process we also found and fixed typos and grammatical errors. Since the translation tone varied, proofreading was needed, but with Yeonoh's help we were able to quickly organize the entire document and raise its completeness.

After finishing the translation, we notified the original author again, and the author replied that they would attach the translation link to the English document. The team found it especially meaningful that the study group's output remained as an actual translated document and printed copy.