[docs] Remove languages: fr, de, ja, es, ru

[mnajdova]

The PR removes the following languages from the docs - fr, de, ja, es, ru. The community has not been able to translate them enough. They are up to date, but in English, so not really helpful. They are also the ones with the less usage.

I recommend review per commit.

I've also added redirects for the languages that are removed, let me know if I should revert this change.

TODO:

• Revert bdad428

[mnajdova]

@mbrookes what should be changed on https://translate.mui.com?

[mui-pr-bot]

No bundle size changes

Generated by 🚫 dangerJS against d894452

[eps1lon]

We should flip https://github.com/mui-org/material-ui/blob/5c68fe51b3369a746e82c1594046bc69f3821dd9/docs/next.config.js#L211-L211 to build all locales for testing purposes before merging.

[oliviertassinari]

I think that we should update https://github.com/mui-org/material-ui-com/blob/master/_redirects to redirect the old URLs. For instance https://material-ui.com/fr/components/alert/ should be a 301 to https://mui.com/components/alert/.

[oliviertassinari]

I've also added redirects for the languages that are removed

These are not redirections, they are proxies.

[mnajdova]

Right, I haven't noticed the HTTP status code. Were these previously added for the new pages only?

[mnajdova]

Or should we actually make these redirects if we no longer want to support these languages?

[oliviertassinari]

fr, de, ja were not server-side rendered (next.js exportPathMap function), so we had to proxied them. In our case, we can turn them all to a 301. No need for the ! as the HTML files won't exist.

[mnajdova]

Aaaah ok, it makes sense now, wasn't sure why these three were only added. Thanks for the clarification. Will update them now

[mnajdova]

I think that we should update https://github.com/mui-org/material-ui-com/blob/master/_redirects to redirect the old URLs. For instance https://material-ui.com/fr/components/alert/ should be a 301 to https://mui.com/components/alert/.

Created https://github.com/mui-org/material-ui-com/pull/1

[mbrookes]

what should be changed on https://translate.mui.com

I'll remove the languages that have been removed here.

Frankly though, unless Crowdin step up, and fix the issues that prevent further translation of Chinese and Portuguese Brazilian, we might as well give up on translation altogether. It would be a terrible waste, given the time, effort and money that's gone into building the i18n infrastructure, and translations, but half translated is worse than untranslated.

[oliviertassinari]

It looks good. The next SEO crawl will ultimately confirm if it's a step forward 😁. I recall spending 4 weekends in a row in 2019 to fix everything. At each iteration, I would miss something.

[oliviertassinari]

unless Crowdin step up

@mbrookes Would it make sense to give them an ultimatum?

I'm curious to see how React will handle this problem with https://github.com/reactjs/reactjs.org-translation. Did they say that they are working on a rewrite of the docs?

[mbrookes]

Would it make sense to give them an ultimatum?

A little hard to do when we use their services for free (even though we acknowledge them in the README). I've sent another follow-up to the case I opened in January. After that, I guess we look for an alternative, or give up on handling the docs i18n natively, and leave l10n to 3rd-party forks.

(Yes, React are doing a functional component/hooks based rewrite.)

I'll remove the languages that have been removed here.

This is done BTW, along with removing v4 master, and renaming next to master.

I took a local copy of the translations, in case we decide to reinstate any of them in the future.