[I've tried to move this back to R-devel, which I think is what Brian Ripley tried and nobody followed...]
On Sun, Aug 4, 2013 at 4:15 PM, John Kane <jrkrideau at inbox.com> wrote:
I tried it in French and there a few hiccups but it's not too bad. Personally I'd like to see the help tranlated into English too.l John Kane Kingston ON Canada
The problems of getting translations for help pages are many-fold:
1. Giving translators access to current .Rd files, which is tricky
when people are developing with roxygen2.
2. Finding translators to do the work. There are a lot of tools for
helping translate message files, but whole .Rd docs might be too much
for the casual translator.
3. Having a standard way to display help in language X if it exists,
considering the complexity of R's help (plain text, web, PDF
versions). Put it all in help/XX and html/XX and doc/XX for XX in
languages?
4. As (3) but with vignettes. Wouldn't vignette("foo",language="fr")
be nice if "foo" was available in French? Or vignette(language="de")
to get all German vignettes?
5. Language bloat. Best solved by making language documentation 'add
on' packs. Easier for a package developer to do for one package, hard
for core R with several packages and core documentation.
6. How do you integrate that with CRAN?
7. Does CRAN have to build all the built languages documentation from
the language .Rd files? A standard repository structure on github and
some github_ wrapper functions might help kick this off since there
wouldn't be a need to bother the busy CRAN people with things.
Of all of that I reckon foreign-language vignette support might be the
easiest to implement. It would seem to require a way for an author to
specify the language of a vignette, a standard place for languaged
vignettes (source and built), and a mod to the vignette function to
look in those places.
The comparable translation project I know of is the translation of
documents for the OSGeo Live DVD - this consists of translations of
short project introductions and walkthroughs (with screenshots) for
about 50 pieces of software, which is probably of the order of
difficulty of translating an R package with about 100 well-documented
functions. It works well but it does have a lot of commitment from
everyone every six months at the release points.
However, getting all the R documentation translated is probably easier
than getting everyone to speak english - we started trying to do that
in the 18th century and look how that turned out...
Barry