My original idea was to start translating Rd files directly. It looks easy
to just skip all the tags and translate rest (but maybe I'm wrong on this).
I'm sure we can figure out better ways to do this later.

To get an idea how big the documentation is, I've scraped all the .rd files
from ftp://cran.r-project.org/pub/R/src/contrib/. In total there are
1,356,002 Rd files (including releases in archive). The good thing is that
there is 50% chance that nothing in documentation changes with new release
for a package.  In 30% of releases only single file in documentation is
changed. There is 80% chance that single file won't change with new
release. I have not included packages in base, but hopefully these are even
more stable.

You can find the summary on google docs:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqX_LPR-VtE1dG10MkYzTlRDcDZMT2o4bmpSbF9aNlE#gid=0

I agree with the idea that translation for package should be treated as
optional add-on pack. I also think that that we need separate translations
for separate versions of package. In the simplest form we can keep similar
structure as current source code repository
ftp://cran.r-project.org/pub/R/src/contrib/ Example folder structure
proposal for package foo:

src/
..foo/
.......foo_1.0/
..............foo_1.0_man_cs.tar.gz
..............foo_1.0_man_en.tar.gz
..............foo_1.0_man_de.tar.gz

where cs/en/de are language codes of translation.

In the simplest form (and I think we really need to constraint scope of
this in 1st generation) the following functions have to be modified:

install.packages()
update.packages()
help()

Anyone interested in cooperation on this? Unfortunately my programming
skills are limited and I welcome any help.

Regards,

Tomas


On 5 August 2013 00:22, Barry Rowlingson <b.rowlingson@lancaster.ac.uk>wrote:

> [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@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
>

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