Suggestion: Add Chinese translation support for User Guide documentation

[Monika18Y]

Hello TriliumNext team,
First of all, thank you for continuing the development of Trilium and bringing this great knowledge management tool forward.
I would like to suggest adding Chinese translation support for the User Guide.
Chinese has a large user community, and providing translated documentation could help more users discover and adopt TriliumNext.
Possible approaches:
Maintain a Chinese version of the User Guide
Allow community contributors to help translate documentation(🥺🙋🏻)

I would be happy to help with Chinese translation if a contribution workflow is available.
Thank you for your work on TriliumNext!

[eliandoran]

@Nriver , what's your opinion of this?

Personally I've thought a few times about adding localization support for translations and it does make sense, my only worry was that it is hard to translate such a big blob of text and modern translation tools kind of bridge that gap.

Weblate (our translation platforms) supports Markdown files so we could theoretically achieve it.

For reference, the User Guide is 264 markdown pages, ~117k words, plus ~300 images

[Nriver]

There's a great project available at https://github.com/baddate/trilium-wiki, along with his Chinese Trilium wiki site https://trilium.smj.im/ . Although it may not have the absolute latest information, It's a quite good documentation for beginners. I've recommended it in the welcome message of my Chinese chat groups.

Full translation is a substantial undertaking. It would be great if some kind of AI handle a preliminary translation and make it available online, allowing interested people to refine it later.

Actually, when I come across an English page and feel too tired to read it, I use kiss-translator. Just press Alt+Q in the browser and the extension translates the whole page into Chinese. It creates a temporary side-by-side translation that looks good most of the time.

[march-7th-mini]

When reading the help documentation, the machine-translated descriptions of some technical terms often leave users scratching their heads.

Previously, I experimented with Vibe Coding to build a standalone mirrored Chinese help system inside Trilium — "Trilium Next 内置用户指南（简中版）" — hoping to keep the framework's directory structure exactly aligned with the official one.

However, while using AI to scaffold and fill in the content, proofreading revealed several constraints:

• Some help documents are not built-in; they point to external links (and there are quite a lot of them).
• Those external-linked notes can only be scraped and edited from the online help web pages, which breaks many internal Trilium links. Fixing them basically means manually editing every help note one by one after all of them have been created.
• Another constraint: with my current approach, when the English help docs are updated, the mirrored Chinese help cannot immediately know what has changed.
• The volume of text is really large. Based on v0.103.0, I only finished translating and proofreading the following chapters before taking a break for several days — Feature Highlights, Quick Start, Installation & Setup, Basic Concepts and Features, Note Types, AI, FAQ.

Because of the huge amount of text, and since the remaining chapters involve more and more development-related terminology, I paused for fear of mistranslations. For now, the only implemented feature is that the help panel opened in a split view automatically redirects to the Chinese version.

How the built-in User Guide (Simplified Chinese) is implemented:

• Each Chinese help note is mapped to its English counterpart via labels: originalHelpNoteId = _help_XXX, helpDoc = zh, with iconClass preserving the original icons.
• When clicking the "?" help button in the Trilium Next UI, the front-end script "帮助文档中文版自动跳转补丁" (label #run=frontendStartup) listens to the contextual-help split view, looks up the Chinese note by originalHelpNoteId, and switches to it in the same panel; if no Chinese version exists, the English one is kept.
• Translation does not rely on online translation: AI produces the draft, followed by manual / multi-round polishing. The content is stored offline, which also means the help notes take up a fair amount of space.

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在看帮助文档时，一些专业术语的机翻描述确实经常让人摸不清头脑。

之前我用 Vibe Coding 尝试测试过在 Trilium 内搭建一套独立的镜像中文帮助："Trilium Next 内置用户指南（简中版）"，希望框架目录结构保持与官方完全一致。

但是在借助 AI 搭建填充内容的时候，校对发现了几处制约：

• 部分帮助文档并不是内置的，而是指向外部链接（这部分帮助文档还不少）。
• 这些外链笔记只能去在线的帮助 web 页面爬取编辑，这导致很多在 Trilium 内链的笔记失效，要修复基本等同于全部帮助笔记都要创建完成后才能手动逐一去编辑修复。
• 另外一个制约是：目前我这种方式，当英文的帮助文档修改了，自己维护的镜像中文帮助不能第一时间知道修改了什么。
• 文本量真的不小，基于 v0.103.0 版本，我仅翻译核对完了以下章节就歇了好几天——功能亮点（Feature Highlights）、快速开始（Quick Start）、安装与设置（Installation & Setup）、基本概念与功能（Basic Concepts and Features）、笔记类型（Note Types）、AI、常见问题（FAQ）。

由于文本量巨大，后续剩余章节涉及开发的专业术语越来越多，担心翻译词不达意就暂停了，目前也只实现了在分屏弹出的帮助能自动劫持跳转至中文。

内置用户指南（简中版）实现方式：

• 每篇中文帮助笔记通过标签与英文帮助一一对应：originalHelpNoteId = _help_XXX、helpDoc = zh，并用 iconClass 保持原版图标。
• 点击 Trilium Next 界面 ? 帮助按钮时，由前端脚本"帮助文档中文版自动跳转补丁（标签 #run=frontendStartup）"监听 contextual-help 分屏，按 originalHelpNoteId 找到中文笔记并在同一分屏切换；没有中文版就保留英文。
• 翻译不依赖在线翻译：采用 AI 直接翻译成稿、人工/多轮精修，内容离线存储，这也导致帮助笔记占用空间不小。