This was an R-devel topic, and I have moved it where it belongs. See the posting guide.
On 03/08/2013 08:34, Tom?? Greif wrote:
Bert, thank you for your response. I understand this would be huge task. My idea is: 1. Translation of help files is optional, driven by demand. This way (as I believe) core packages will get translated first, followed by some other CRAN packages. I don't expect that every page is translated.
It is not just a question of translating, but keeping translations up to date. Even for messages, the latter is an issue.
2. Use collaborative open-source tools for translation. For example crowdin is online translation tool free for open-source projects. Alternatively, wiki can be used for translation (it would be however necessary to program link to upload original translation and download translations back) 3. When browsing help, file based on user's locale will be displayed (if exists) with failover to default (English).
You had better check the version that was translated, and that is not currently recorded in the file.
I agree with you that translation has to be exact. However, I believe that users can benefit more from slightly inexact documentation written in their first language than from exact documentation in language they do not understand well.
That is a matter of opinion: many people have the opposite opinion.
Any idea how to create proof of concept for this? I guess this would require attention from someone from r-core team.
Not so. R is Open Source: just go ahead and do it. You can contribute patches via bugs.r-project.org. But note that this would not get released under R 3.1.0 ca Mar 2014, so there is plenty of time to iron this out and submit a fully working solution. Another small issue is size. For R itself the 'English' (mostly American) help pages are about 10MB installed. Adding help pages for, say, the 15 languages for which we have translated messages would increase the size of R about 2.5x.
Regards, Tomas On 3 August 2013 01:39, Bert Gunter <gunter.berton at gene.com> wrote:
Tom???? 1. Your concern is valid, especially now that R has become so widely used throughout the world. But language translation is hard. 2. Warning and error messages are short, and relatively trivial to translate. 3. There are tens of thousands of Help pages in thousands of packages, most separately maintained. I would guess that the best option would be to try to run the files through a mature, open source translator, if such exists. However, I'm ignorant of such matters. And my understanding is that at present, even the best may not be adequate (Help files have to accurate in exact detail). Best, Bert On Fri, Aug 2, 2013 at 2:54 PM, Tom???? Greif <tomas.greif at collectionspro.eu> wrote:
Is it possible to translate help files? I see there are some localization options for GUI, but not for help. I think this would be really helpful
for
users who don't have English as their primary language.
Because all the online help is created from text files, it should be not
that difficult to maintain different language versions (e.g. to mark them
as not valid when primary documentation in English changes).
Regards,
Tomas Greif
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