documentation translation

[karlitschek]

It is difficult to translate our full documentation into other languages because the translated will be outdated very soon. Most of the time it is better to look into the english translation then into the outdated and incomplete locally translated documentation.

But what we could do to help people who don´t speak english is to integrate an online translation service like google translate or a free alternative to that. This translation could be done directly on the frontpage of the documentation or we mention the option how to do this manually on the homepage

[vgezer]

This question was also raised by me here.

Personally, I don't like online translations services. Also, Chrome/Chromium suggests if they like to translate the page or not. Apart from that, users can just copy and paste the link into google translate page to have the page translated.

Today I checked the people contributing to OC translation on Transifex and we have 1716 people contributing which is quite OK IMO to have updated documentation localization for common languages. Of course, we should not start allowing translations if we think the layouts/buttons may change so often.

How often do you think the documentation will be outdated? If they are just typos or minor changes, transifex offers history and the contributors can use them by diff'ing the changes.

[LukasReschke]

TBH: We should first have a proper english documentation before thinking about translating the existing content :-)

[MorrisJobke]

I would also keep it as it is now, because if someone doesn't speak English the search result wouldn't be clicked to get to an english page where you could translate something automatically.

:+1: for @wakeup 's comment

[BernhardPosselt]

Every developer should be able to read the english documentation. As for the admin and user manual I'm not sure but I'd close this issue and only reopen it if we have a full translation of any of the docs and an active translater.

[karlitschek]

At the LinuxTag booth this year we had several people who couldn't read english and requested translated documentation. This is why I opened this issue.

[vgezer]

IMO, only user manual translations are sufficient in the first step. In anyway admins will need to contact to the English speaking community in case of any problems. If we have enough contributions and high translation percentages, we can also do the same for the admin manual.

Since my previous issue is closed, I can post the trial that I've done on transifex here again: https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/owncloud-user-documentation/

I clearly stated that I will not be accepting any languages until this issue is approved.

NB: We already have French and Japanese requests :).

[DeepDiver1975]

It's really some effort to keep the documentation source uptodate between github and transifex. In addition we need to build the final html and pdfs and publish them to the web server.

Nothing is impossible but it consumes some time and continuous maintenance.

[tflidd]

Someone translated the 9.0-(user)-documentation to French: https://forum.owncloud.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=35027

[scheppi2610]

why don't you just offer a platform where users can upload their translated versions and reference them to english original versions. That should enable everybody to decide whether an possibly slightly outdated documentation might be even better than not understanding a up-to-date english one. I could imagine of translating a couple of basic documents into german where changes are not likely to happen too often.

[settermjd]

Having an international community would necessitate having the documentation translated as widely as possible. But, at this stage, I'll need to do further research before being able to suggest a solid course of action. But thanks for raising the issue.

[settermjd]

@felixboehm is this something that you're working on?

[voroyam]

is this still on the radar?

[voroyam]

https://www.transifex.com is an option