algorithm-archive
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algorithm-archivists
Implementing translations
Do you think that it's possible and useful to translate the book or some chapters ? If so, how could we do that ?
@xam4lor I thought about translating some chapters into another language (German for me) as well. I would support translations, because it would provide a lot more use-cases of the AAA (e.x. schools).
So good news! GitBook provides native support for multiple languages and I got it working. Some things tho:
- We need to think about some ways to provide language switching (there's a plugin, but it's not perfect). I already have a promising way in my mind, that should work (requires some contribution guidelines for translation submissions tho, but I think that's not too much of a problem).
- The implementation of multiple languages would also prompt the user to select a language, when visiting
algorithm-archive.org. The question is: Do we want that? And if no, how do we set a default?
Let's also see, what @leios s opinion on the whole topic is.
It would be awesome to be able to publish the book in multiple languages, but I honestly don't think that it's feasable with a team of this size. We would need permanently need translators in the team. We might have a french translator now, but what if they're gone in 2 months? Then we can't continue translating to french and we'd have to search for a new translator. It's also very difficult to review the translations.
I think we'd end up with incomplete translations and without translators for them.
I agree that translations would be great! However, I might need to side with @Butt4cak3 on this one. The book is constantly changing (look at gaussian elimination), so if we have a translation, then update the English version, we then need to update all translations. That's a crazy amount of work!
If the translator is no longer a part of the community, then that work cannot be done anymore.
I think we could do translations for the chapters that are not likely to change, though. We should leave this issue open for a bit and see what people think or re-open it in a few months when the AAA is more stable.
I also think it's a bit premature, although a good idea in principle. At the moment let's focus everyone's energy on making great content in English. Also, even if a reader's English is not great, they can still read the code!
I agree with @julianschacher ! But may be translate only the definitely complete chapters?
Well, I think you can point out that some versions of translations is written by community contributors. Like some other websites, providing a link to the original English version is a good idea too. By the way, I can help you translate it into Chinese in my spare time.
That's a good idea, you could probably put a warning like "The translations may not be 100% accurate due to the fact that they are written by the community" and even say that the English version is the "main version".
And we can put a message like "The translation of this page is out of date. Please visit English version to get latest version." when translation isn’t up-to-date.
Are we still thinking about translating the AAA, or should this issue be closed?
I am still not sure about translations, but I don't know if there is too much harm keeping this issue up for now. I think my main fear with this is figuring out who maintains what language (we are already having this problem with just programming languages).
I think @jiegillet is right (from 2 years ago). It's still a bit premature, but that doesn't mean we should prevent the discussion