I had the pleasure of knowing what it was all about a little before the official launch. A few days ago Ángel Domínguez, a friend and fellow translator, published a personal project which I find courageous (or daring if you want — pun intended) and well executed. Tired of poor Spanish translations of articles and excerpts from Daring Fireball, John Gruber’s popular weblog, Ángel has put together Daring Fireball en Español, which is precisely the Spanish version of Gruber’s website. All by himself.

Attention to detail is impressive: the color scheme is identical but used in reverse, fonts and layout are the same. As Ángel wrote:

Great effort was put into trying to emulate the original structure and logic of the original Daring Fireball, and for the most part it has been achieved. Posts in Spanish have two stars that link to both the Spanish entry and the original English entry, and titles are linked to the original news source that is mentioned in the very entry.

Ángel’s idea is that his work could become a reference point and a reliable source for Spanish technical press, Spanish Mac-oriented blogs, Spanish tech pundits, etc. in need to properly cite John Gruber’s articles and comments. This translation work is obviously useful to all Spanish-speaking readers who can’t read Gruber’s pieces in the original English.

John Gruber is aware of it, and gave his approval so long as it is specified that Daring Fireball en Español is a personal project and not affiliated with the original Daring Fireball. I’m a bit surprised that Gruber did not mention it officially, neither on Daring Fireball, nor on Twitter. Ultimately one should feel nothing but pride for such an initiative. If it happened to me, I’d be honoured: I would think, here’s someone who appreciates my work enough to bother creating an entire website and volunteering to translate my work, surely devoting a considerable amount of time to it — to translate the articles I’ve already written and to keep the blog constantly updated, following my pace and keeping up with my updates. I think that such an effort should be awarded at least by mentioning its very existence.

Needless to add, Ángel Domínguez’s work is of the highest quality. Even if you don’t speak Spanish, I urge you to take a look at his website anyway, perhaps comparing it with the original by opening the two in different tabs in your browser. It is perhaps the first case of a blog with facing translation.