[docs] Translate the documentation to Chinese / 将文档翻译成中文

[oliviertassinari]

Summary 💡

There is a huge community of Chinese developers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers

But very few actually speak English: https://www.quora.com/What-of-Chinese-speak-English, likely fewer than 10%.

Translating the docs could be a great growth opportunity, especially for MUI X, Base UI, and MUI System which are a lot less design-dependent.

Examples 🌈

• https://recharts.org/zh-CN/
• https://www.qt.io/zh-cn/

Context

• https://mui-org.notion.site/Docs-localization-what-s-next-3f370280b58f446fbb5559dfc08fe03e
• Struggle to communicate with Chinese users https://www.notion.so/mui-org/Lee-jijyun-f4786a2f39344d428564b8722d74a3fa?pvs=4#6ed6fb0ac5f74be7904dfb1e33dac17a

---

总结💡

有一个庞大的中国开发者社区 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%8C%89%E4%BA%BA%E5%8F%A3%E6%8E%92%E5%88%97%E7%9A%84%E8%AF%AD%E8%A8%80%E5%88%97%E8%A1%A8

但实际上很少有人会说英语：https://www.quora.com/What-of-Chinese-speak-English，可能不到 10%。

翻译文档可能是一个巨大的增长机会，特别是对于 MUI X、Base UI 和 MUI System 来说，它们对设计的依赖性要小得多。

例子🌈

• https://recharts.org/zh-CN/

[oliviertassinari]

When it comes to the community, I suspect that we would need to duplicate it. Have a GitHub repository just for Chinese issues with users and a bilingual moderator that would connect them back to English issues, as the source of truth.

[ChTiSh]

Hi Olivier, would love to help with the Chinese translation issue. I saw the note that everything is now removed, please let me know how I can help.

[oliviertassinari]

@ChTiSh Upvoting the issue would already be nice.

While I don't believe in the potential of growing Material Design for the Chinese community, I'm convinced that with Base UI, MUI X Data Grid, MUI X Charts, MUI System, it would make sense. Maybe Joy UI too.

Part of the challenge is visible from https://www.notion.so/mui-org/docs-infra-Chinese-localization-3f370280b58f446fbb5559dfc08fe03e?pvs=4#2d2545623c3346f6b6df298787ede176:

For the localization to truly benefit users, you need a Chinese community, but:

• Having a staff who speak Chinese and the docs translated is not enough, e.g. recharts example. We have one team member who speaks Chinese: @mj12albert.
• What seems to truly rule a growing Chinese community is: % of issues written in Chinese, number of questions answered in https://www.oschina.net/, https://segmentfault.com/.

In any cases, there is no Chinese community possible without translation, so I think we should do it. As for when, I think that it should match with when we fill a React Engineer - Docs-infra role.

[ChTiSh]

Thank you for the info, Olivier. I've upvoted the issue. The React Engineer - Docs-infra does not appear to work for me.

I understand the trade-offs, but also see great potential. I noticed that MUI has not tried the Google Translate and community support model. I'm curious if this approach could serve as an initiator to attract and keep the Chinese community engaged. While it would definitely introduce some maintenance overhead, the translation work could be an excellent first issue for developers eager to contribute -- especially given the current challenges in getting a PR accepted into any established open source rep. I've also noticed that moving baseUI to a separate repo is a 2024 initiative, could that serve as proof of concept? I would love to get an issue to work on.