Towards a Universal Python: Translating the Natural Modality of Python into Other Human Languages

Abstract

The Python programming language plays a large role in computer science today, both in industry and education. While the pseudo-code nature of its keywords and built-in functions/modules makes programming easy to learn for English speakers, non-English speakers do not have this advantage. Our goal is to further the democratization of computer science, allowing anyone to code in their native language, anywhere. This paper describes our vision for realizing this goal by automatically translating Python (keywords, error messages, identifiers) into other human languages, leveraging recent developments in machine translation and language technologies in general. As a first step, we introduce a preliminary multilingual Python tool that enables a user to code, translate, and execute Python in 5 additional languages, as well as a roadmap for the future development of our automated framework.