Possible Retirement of /en/OCR-and-Machine-Translation

[charlottejmc]

I'm opening an issue to discuss the possible retirement of /en/OCR-and-Machine-Translation. Currently, its many unsolved issues have halted its translation into Portuguese (documented in ph-submissions Issue #371).

• The lesson appears to be written only for users of the Mac operating system, so users of other systems would have to adapt the instructions
• The translation software used in the lesson (Yandex) has been deprecated, and this is corroborated by an open issue unresolved since 2020 on the Translate Shell repository
• The -despeckle script does not work as expected, and needs to be run many more times for the user to start seeing a slight difference
• A couple of other scripts remain unclear, and require additional instructions to be run effectively (see details in this comment)
• Overall, the lesson requires significant prior knowledge and applied experience, both to work through the steps as they are explained, and to adapt them to different operating systems and alternative software. Therefore, it is expected to become an advanced level lesson, rather than intermediate.

I have written to the author @akhlaghiandrew to ask whether they would have the capacity to update the lesson to address these issues, ideally within the next 2 months. If they do not, and/or if we are in agreement that to update this lesson would be too complex, and raise too many new challenges for readers, then @hawc may take the difficult decision to retire it altogether, in line with our Lesson Retirement Policy.

@hawc2, @anisa-hawes and I are on hand to help with any questions you may have, so please do get in touch!

[hawc2]

Hi @akhlaghiandrew, as Managing Editor of the Programming Historian in English, I'm writing to check in whether you will be able to respond to this request for updates? If we don't hear from you in the next month, we will be proceeding with retiring this lesson. In that case, your lesson will still be discoverable as a retired lesson (with a URL that follows this format: https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/retired/LESSON-TITLE) which can continue to be cited, but we won't continue to update the code and lesson to accommodate necessary changes.