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It may be a daunting task. Or maybe not; I’ve not the experience to make any sort of quick estimation.

But either way, Headius (AKA Charlie Nutter of JRuby fame) has put out the call:

As many of you know, Ruby was created in Japan by Yukihiro Matsumoto, and most of the core development team is still Japanese to this day. This has posed a serious problem for the Ruby community, since the language barrier between the Japanese core team and community and the English-speaking community is extremely high. Only a few members of the core team can speak English comfortably, so discussions about the future of Ruby, bug fixes, and new features happens almost entirely on the Japanese ruby-dev mailing list. That leaves those of us English speakers on the ruby-core mailing list out in the cold.

We need a two-way autotranslator.

So: What’s involved? What tool already exist? Just how hard might this be? Who can do this?