Re: [matplotlib-devel] Possibility for internationalized sphinx docs?

[Benjamin R. <ben...@ou...>]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 3:27 PM, Gökhan Sever <gok...@gm...> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 12:45 PM, Benjamin Root <ben...@ou...> wrote:
>
>> Hello all,
>>
>> Given some recent -- ahem -- difficulties with matplotlib users where
>> English is not their native language, it has dawned on me that maybe we
>> ought to consider making available translated versions of our
>> documentation.  I have absolutely no experience with such efforts, but I did
>> see that Sphinx does support internationalization:
>>
>> http://sphinx.pocoo.org/latest/intl.html
>>
>> and I do believe we have some bilingual developers on this list (or at
>> least are active on the users list).  While I don't think it would be
>> possible to translate the API docs effectively, at the very least we should
>> be able to provide translations of other parts.
>>
>> What does everyone think?  Could someone who has done internationalization
>> (particularly using sphinx) comment?  What languages would we like the docs
>> to be in?
>>
>> Ben Root
>>
>
>
I think Eric had the best point against internationalization:

I think this is premature.  My sense is that there are other aspects of
> the docs and code that should be cleaned up first, and that having
> translations of the docs will actually make this more difficult--there
> will be more pieces of the system to try to keep up to date
>

I definitely do agree with Paul's point

English being lingua franca ;) is fairly typical in the software
world, but that doesn't mean we should feel free to sprinkle
idioms and confusing cultural references everywhere. I'm guilty
of both of these, as I sometimes try to add "color" to my
comments, which might produce a chuckle for the folks who
understood, but be a source of unneeded confusion for others.

I guess I was thinking more along the lines of enabling translation
contributions from users as opposed to devoting core development resources
to translation.  In other words, does it take more than just enabling some
options and modifying the doc directory tree to then allow anybody to
provide a translated version of a page?


I think working on adding new features into mpl and making sure that its a
> bug-free library are better investments instead of spending time on
> providing  translated documents. Google translate gives a funny but still
> useful translation in my native language :)
>
> Anyways, is there any programming language out or plans for Python that
> provides syntax for non-English languages?
>
>
Doesn't Perl5 let you completely restructure its syntax?  And bash does have
me typing "fi" everywhere...

Ben Root