Hey Leonel,
First, thanks for the detailed feedback!
Translation status: We have just completed the Chinese translation (see
http://zh.eytam.com), and we are in process of Spanish translation. We hope to complete it very soon. I'm aware of the differences between Spain's and LATAM's Spanish, but we're not going to make two versions - we're making a unified Spanish version.
About the translation: Answer is yes, everything is translated - all GUI(menus, dialogs, commands), variable/function names, all standard names and reserved words, all world fields, all gallery objects, tutorials, documentation - everything (see
Chinese or
Hebrew versions as examples). (Unicode support was added for that, and world/object storage model changed completely).
Regarding mother tongue vs. English: Interestingly this issue keeps coming up in many discussions I have with CS teachers. There's a document explaining the
considerations in designing educational programming languages, and, more specifically, why it was decided to have all programming language components in the student's mother tongue. In short, the main purpose of Mama, just like Alice's, is to
lower the barrier[1] towards learning computer programming.
I don't know what age are your students, but think of 9 to 13 year old kid who is a non English speaker - that doubles the difficulty (and worse than Spanish, think of Chinese, Hebrew and Arabic which use different character sets and/or RTL read & write direction).
About Mama's price: I released the first version of Mama in 2005, as a simplified programming language for teaching young students computer science. I charged for it nothing, and made it publicly available. It's syntax is quite similar to Python's (I liked very much the indention based structuring), but much more simple, real object oriented with own OO event model and with built in GUI library. In the last year I've worked hard on integrating Mama language with an improved Alice2.2 version, because of it's awesome 3D and drag&drop programming environment. Since I am not paid by anyone for this work, I had to set Mama's price for the minimum of 10 US$. Though, the original Mama's typing based IDE is till available for free, with many helpful tools included.
Also note, that while Alice is free, it's documentation is not: books are somewhere between 30 and 60 USD. Mama's documentation is all free.
[1] Lowering the barriers to programming: A taxonomy of programming environments and languages for novice programmers, Kelleher, C. and Pausch, R., ACM Comput. Surv. 37, 2 (2005)