Implementing translations

[xam4lor]

Do you think that it's possible and useful to translate the book or some chapters ?
If so, how could we do that ?

[june128]

@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).

[xam4lor]

For me it's more about French! May be there is a gitbook plugin?....

[june128]

Yeah maybe, I'm currently looking for one :D

[xam4lor]

That would be so great!!

[june128]

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.

[Butt4cak3]

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.

[june128]

@Butt4cak3 I mean incomplete translations aren't so bad.

[lulucca12]

About this I can help to translate to Portuguese, I'm Brazilian.

[leios]

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.

[jiegillet]

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!

[xam4lor]

I agree with @julianschacher ! But may be translate only the definitely complete chapters?

[shine5402]

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.

[xam4lor]

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".

[shine5402]

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.

[june128]

I think we can tackle this issue again, after #388 is finished.

[Amaras]

Are we still thinking about translating the AAA, or should this issue be closed?

[leios]

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