Documentation Translation (we first need committed translators)

[shaonkabir8]

Hi 👋 we're already a large community with different languages. 🚀 Hopefully we should have a several translated versions of our README or other dosc. 💥 It's my personal suggestions. and obviously I'd love to start contributing 🖐️

Thanks 🙏

[joshgoebel]

I'd love this but the docs regularly change (so it's a moving target)... currently I'd wager our English README is WAY, WAY newer than our Russian one. I try and keep the URLs and version numbers updated, but not much else - since I can't read any of it. It also seems we'd optimally need at least TWO people for each foreign language... one to translate then another to review the work for issues (who can also read the language)... I'd rather have one accurate document in English than 10 old translations that aren't being maintained. So my biggest concern in the long-term maintenance of the translations...

I wonder if some type of auto-translate might be a better solution?

@allejo @egor-rogov Any thoughts?

[allejo]

I think it'd be great if we could start translating our documentation into other languages. However, I agree with Josh where we would need several dedicated users to help us translate this; at least two per language. Despite us being a fairly large community, I don't think it's large enough to be able to maintain a healthy internationalization of our docs like React does. But I hope I'm wrong and if we start asking users if they'd be interested in helping with translations, then we'd get plenty of volunteers.

Realistically and short-term, we could encourage users to try using Google Translate on our docs and then giving us feedback on things we could try rewriting so that Google Translate can handle it better?

[joshgoebel]

try using Google Translate on our docs and then giving us feedback on things we could try rewriting so that Google Translate can handle it better?

I'd wonder to see what such changes might be though. I'm not sure we should reduce the English readability of the docs just to improve the readability of a translation.

Especially since I presume and hope Google translate isn't a static target. IE I assume it gets better over time so changes docs to deal with point in time quirks in the translation seems problematic.

[shaonkabir8]

You're completely right @allejo 🔥 Steps we can do:

• we can handle this situation using Google Translator at first step.
• Make a list of contributors who are highly interested to translate our docs into their native language.
• we'll only start translating using google translate our docs according to our contributors.
• Once we get our auto translated docs, our contributors will now help making changes on our genarated files . Still there's some issues with google translator. 😭

[allejo]

Oh I agree, we should not reduce English readability. I'm just thinking that if someone finds something that is translated very poorly and they're able to rewrite it to be translated better and still make sense in English, then we could be looking for that type of feedback in the meanwhile.

[joshgoebel]

The problem with that is that anytime anyone is updating the readme they're not thinking about what changes have been made in the past to improve the translation they're only reading the current English and then perhaps finding a better way to phrase it. 

So today's tweak to improve the translation is just destroyed by tomorrow's edit.  

[joshgoebel]

Honestly I'm not even sure google translate is a brilliant idea unless we actually have some native speakers of whichever languages were considering actually read the Google translate results and see if it's usable.

Plus isn't google translate something that you can use easily inside the browser? Ie, someone should be able to run it on our read me easily without us actually doing anything. Or am I thinking of something else?

[allejo]

Oh, err, allow me to clarify a bit; I wasn't super clear :sweat_smile: I didn't mean to use Google Translate to translate the README or RTD and then dump that off to a new website. I meant, more so just encourage users to use Google Translate in their browsers (like Chrome does natively or some browser extension) for the time being and seeing how well that does.

i.e. I think we should gather user feedback on "can we tell users to use Google Translate because it's good enough?" or "do we need to gather a team of translators and make a plan for maintenance of multi-language docs?"

[shaonkabir8]

So, what's the final decision then? 🤔

[joshgoebel]

I think someone plays with Google Translate (is there some way we can link to versions of the docs auto-translated?) until we have multiple people who volunteer to be ongoing translators...

[michaeltomasik]

@joshgoebel I can translate to Polish if you want

[shaonkabir8]

@joshgoebel I can translate to Polish if you want

Awesome ❤️ Stay connected mate. 😘😘

[michaeltomasik]

@joshgoebel I can translate to Polish if you want

Awesome ❤️ Stay connected mate. 😘😘

I already started translating README.md from master will push my PR this month

[joshgoebel]

I really worry about not having any automated way to keep all these translations up-to-date - that they are going to age as poorly as our Russian copy has... and whether having 10 old out-of-date READMEs in native languages is better than having a single up-to-date canonical English version...

[michaeltomasik]

I really worry about not having any automated way to keep all these translations up-to-date - that they are going to age as poorly as our Russian copy has... and whether having 10 old out-of-date READMEs in native languages is better than having a single up-to-date canonical English version...

@joshgoebel You can ping me every time the docs changes. I know a bunch of polish people who can help :-)

[michaeltomasik]

@joshgoebel @shaonkabir8 I opened PR. Will find some polish people to double-check it. In the meantime could somebody put label hacktoberfest-accepted on my PR ?

[allejo]

So I've been thinking about this a bit more. Originally my suggestion for using Google Translate was to use Google's widget that you could embed in your website and it'll translate your page; i.e. I intended this to be used for RTD since that was the more... text-heavy documentation compared to the README. But Google killed it in favor of native browser support for translation.

The README itself has a lot of text, but the essential information in the README is the code snippets, and they're already split up into sections with names or titles that I would think non-English speakers can recognize or Google fairly easily; e.g., CDN, ES6, Node.js. For this reason, I'd suggest the README itself remain only in English.

The content on RTD is a lot more text-heavy and harder for non-English speakers to understand or translate. IF we were to start translating these docs, I think we should create teams in this organization, e.g. @highlightjs/translators-polish. This way, we'd be able to ping them as a group and anyone on that team would be able to help us out.

All of this being said, translating RTD is not going to be an easy feat. We would need to gather a team of dedicated translators for each language and I don't know about Josh's availability, but mine is limited. There would need to be a volunteer that could gather available translators for different languages.

[joshgoebel]

IF we were to start translating these docs, I think we should create teams in this organization, e.g. @highlightjs/translators-polish. This way, we'd be able to ping them as a group and anyone on that team would be able to help us out.

Wait, you can ping groups? That's kind of awesome.

...the essential information in the README is the code snippets, and they're already split up into sections with names or titles that I would think non-English speakers can recognize ... I'd suggest the README itself remain only in English.

We would need to gather a team of dedicated translators for each language...

Good points... I'm thinking perhaps we don't draw a hard line like this (README vs RTD, etc), but FIRST it's clear we need people... so to accept translated docs I'd say we need a team of at least 3 translators per language...

• 1 to translate
• 1 to review
• 1 extra person for backup

This whole endeavor doesn't work at all if we get 2 people but one of them turns out to be busy, unavailable, gets hit by a bus, etc... IE, it is not helpful if it's done by a single motived person who then moves on leaving documentation behind that will never be updated again - like our very poorly aged Russian README.

[WishAllVA]

Hey I am new here, looking to contribute through code as well as documentation. Can translate the MD files to Hindi(Indian) language until I go through the code.

[joshgoebel]

Which "documentation" are you referring to? Translating the whole docs site would be quite an achievement... and we'd need to figure out how to host multiple translations... most people in the past have been interested in translating the readme, etc... but as always we really need to get 2 or 3 people interested before a translation even begins to make sense because we don't want to have out-of-date translations if a single translator does the work then gets busy with other things, etc...

@WishAllVA Are any of the major translation tools (Google, etc) any good for English -> Hindi these days?

If you're just interested in pitching in in general you could look at the "help wanted" and "good first issue" tags...

[WishAllVA]

as always we really need to get 2 or 3 people interested before a translation even begins to make sense

I can get one more person with me for the translation.

we don't want to have out-of-date translations if a single translator does the work then gets busy with other things

Agreed. So an automation tool is needed to translate, but I don't think there is any tool which does as good a job as manual.

Are any of the major translation tools (Google, etc) any good for English -> Hindi these days?

There are some that do the translation enough so that the end user will understand the meaning, but in no way they'll be perfect in the Hindi Grammar.

If you're just interested in pitching in in general you could look at the "help wanted" and "good first issue" tags

sure, have not worked much on Regex, but hopefully will learn along the way.