Investigating translating documentation

[nzakas]

One thing that we've been missing in our documentation is translations. Other open source projects have managed to figure this out, and now that we have a budget, it's possible to get paid translations. In my mind, the key questions to get answered are:

• Which languages would we want translations for?
• How would we manage translations (storing and updating)?
• How would those translations be represented, searched, and used on the website?

I'm opening this issue to track progress on this investigation and gather feedback.

[nzakas]

Asking some other open source projects about how the manage translations, these services have been recommended to me:

1. Crowdin - GitHub decided to use them for Electron (details).
2. Transifex - Recommended by another person.
3. weblate - used by OpenSUSE.

Just leaving this here for so I don't this info. :)

[mysticatea]

For what it's worth, I'm writing release notes about new features in Japanese in https://qiita.com/mysticatea.

[kaicataldo]

Relevant discussion (since some of these frameworks have built in support): eslint/archive-website#536

Example: Docusaurus

[ilyavolodin]

To be honest, my primary question is, are translations really needed at this point? Is there any evidence that shows that a lot of non-English speaking developers can't read English documentation and google translate is not sufficient?

[nzakas]

I think there’s a lot of value to translations. We already know that both native Japanese (from Toru) and Chinese (cn.eslint.org) speakers prefer documentation in their own languages. When you add on top of that the number of high-profile projects that have invested time and money into translated docs (React, Vue, Node.js, Atom, to name a few), I think there’s a clear signal that translated docs are a big win for users. I think the question should be which languages to translate into rather than if we should translate.

On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 7:03 AM Ilya Volodin ***@***.***> wrote: To be honest, my primary question is, are translations really needed at this point? Is there any evidence that shows that a lot of non-English speaking developers can't read English documentation and google translate is not sufficient? — You are receiving this because you were assigned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#11512?email_source=notifications&email_token=AAAJNEXZ5G2BD7TWG7GVUK3PX7NCLA5CNFSM4G63AAD2YY3PNVWWK3TUL52HS4DFVREXG43VMVBW63LNMVXHJKTDN5WW2ZLOORPWSZGODWSNBPA#issuecomment-497340604>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAAJNESH35CKV2FJPMDR2D3PX7NCLANCNFSM4G63AADQ> .

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______________________________ Nicholas C. Zakas @SlickNet Author, Principles of Object-Oriented JavaScript <http://amzn.to/29Pmfrm> Author, Understanding ECMAScript 6 <http://amzn.to/29K1mIy>

[mysticatea]

Is there any evidence that shows that a lot of non-English speaking developers can't read English documentation

One evidence is, the share percentage of Vue.js and React is pretty different between the English region and non-English regions because Vue.js provides the official high-quality documentation in native languages.

google translate is not sufficient?

It's a great service.
If Google translate didn't exist, I couldn't be active in the OSS community.

So I had investigated Google Translate's Website Widget, but sadly, it has been retired: https://translate.google.com/about/website/

[Archulan]

Hello @nzakas, I'm willing to do the translation into Tamil language. Could you please guide me with this?

[nzakas]

@Archulan thanks for your interest. We're not yet ready to begin accepting translations. Please turn on notifications for this issue to stay up to date with our progress.

[swetankraj]

Hey @nzakas I'd really love to help translating this into Hindi language. Do let me know how to begin.

[kaicataldo]

@swetankraj We really appreciate you wanting to help out! As @nzakas mentions above, we don't have a system for translations in place at the moment, but we'd love your help once we figure that out.

[kaicataldo]

For posterity, here's a post detailing how someone solved this with Eleventy (the static site framework we use for our website).

[swetankraj]

@kaicataldo I'll take a look at that. Thank you!

[shu-pf]

I am looking forward to your translation!
I'm Japanese, so I can help you with Japanese translation. I will help you when the system is ready.

[nzakas]

@shu-pf thanks for your interest! We are in the middle of doing a website redesign, and after we finish that, we will look at translations again.

[AlixFachin]

I am working in a Japanese company where no one really reads English, so I can confirm translation in Japanese would be of a huge help.
As an aside, I find that https://www.deepl.com/translator is much better than Google Translate. (And for some reason it is very good at translating tech-related words!).

I am more than willing to help for the translation of documents, but not being a native Japanese I cannot guarantee a "native" quality 😜

[luifermoron]

Count on me when system is ready for spanish translation!

[nzakas]

Thanks @luifermoron! I’m working on figuring this out. I should hopefully have more info soon.

[nzakas]

Hi everyone! I’m excited to share that our new website is now setup to accept translations. The site is currently at https://new.eslint.org and is our “marketing site.”

The documentation site will be separate and I’ll follow up when it is ready for translation.

If you would be willing to help by translating the marketing site, here are the instructions:
https://github.com/eslint/new.eslint.org#translations

[nzakas]

I just noticed that CrowdIn has a free option for open source projects. I’ll investigate that some more.

[sam3k]

Just tested https://eslint.org/ and seems like we already support the following languages:

• English
• German
• Spanish
• French
• Hindi
• Japanese
• Portuguese
• Mandarin

The original points were:

• Which languages would we want translations for?
• How would we manage translations (storing and updating)?
• How would those translations be represented, searched, and used on the website?

Do we want to keep this issue open until:

• Find a translation management software?
• We add more languages?

By the way, here are a few more translation management software (TMS) solutions that seem to be free for open source software:

• lokalise
• locize

[nzakas]

Yes, let's leave this open. I think we probably need to rethink our translation strategy for documentation as the one translation we've already done has been very manual and there is probably a streamlined process we can figure out with some time.