Author Spotlight: Farzadbayan

^{Farzad and his brother, Farid.}
Farzad Bayan is an author that we reached out to to translate some of our instructables into Farsi! While he's not translating for us anymore, he does keep a Persian how-to blog that makes many American projects much more accessible to foreign readers. He also takes some seriously gorgeous photos. :D


What first brought you to Instructables?

2 years ago, I was searching the "robot" category in a Persian technology blog, and I found a post with this title: "Make your own robot"!
I was interested... The post had a link to the full article, so I clicked and sent to Here, my first meeting with Instructables!


Why did you begin posting projects?

In the early years & in the trust, contests. But at this time, there are many different goals and purposes for me to post my projects.


How much additional work is it to translate your projects into English?

When I check my old projects, I laugh because of my grammar! I don't forget when I used "glow" instead of "glue" in my project and Sarah James noticed me!

It looks like Instructables improved my English a lot.

In the past it took a lot of time to translate, but now just a little additional work, because I write directly in English.


Canida tells me that you are collecting and translating Instructables into Farsi. That’s awesome. Why are you doing it, and what kind of responses have you gotten from existing Instructables authors? Are you looking for more projects?

I have a Persian blog, called Baghbagho that publishes tutorials for Persian (Farsi) language readers. Some of its posts are made by ourselves and some other are translated from international blogs and websites, like Instructables.
All of the responses were very excellent, and they were happy to see that their projects translated to a foreign language.
I don't translate projects anymore, because we changed our policy. But yet, Instructables is the biggest source of idea for us and I give back-link to the original idea when I re-make an Instructables for my blog. (It's hard to find things that Americans use in their projects and because of this problem, re-making and idea, make the project easy-to-make for our readers)


I saw that your LED illuminated eggs were featured in Popular Science. How does it feel to be recognized for your work?

That was a really big honor for me and my work resume.


What advice do you have for authors who have so far not posted a project because of a language barrier?

Just do it and don't worry about language and be sure that other authors will encourage & help you to make better grammar.

There were many authors who helped me to find the best words for my sentences, and now I should say "Thank you!" to all of them. Scoochmaroo is one of them! 


Finally, what projects are you planning to do in the near future?

I'm planning to improve my blog and its authors team (oh, I have a Instructables-like website in my mind!)
I'm planning to take my lifeguard & diving certification in this summer.
I'm planning to improve my PHP coding and graphic design ability.