Localization of The Syncthing Documentation

General
1

Hello Syncthing Community,

I am the author of the Localize The Docs organization. And I’m glad to announce that the :tada: syncthing-docs-l10n :tada: project is published now:

The goal of this project is to translate The Syncthing Documentation into multiple languages. Translations are contributed via the Crowdin platform, automatically synchronized with the GitHub repository, and can be previewed on GitHub Pages.

We welcome anyone interested in documentation translation to join us. If the target language is not supported in the project yet, please submit an issue to request the new language. Once the requested language is added, you can start translating!

See the announcement post for more details.

1 Like
2

My opinion on this is that it’s a misguided method of localising documentation, and that it will not result in a high-quality product. As such, I doubt we’ll adopt it and I’d prefer if you didn’t market it. However, as always, you do you.

3

Hello @calmh, thanks for your reply.

Regarding your concerns, I would like to discuss how to ensure high-quality translation.

First, the infrastructure built for the syncthing-docs-l10n project is designed to minimize manual overhead, ensuring that “pending translations” stay synchronized with the latest English source files as efficiently as possible. Furthermore, leveraging TMS platforms like Crowdin lowers the barrier for contributors by removing the need to operate complex git commands.

Therefore, I believe the issue of translation quality is independent of the design of the infrastructure. Instead, it depends on people and the community. What do you think?

4

I think translation management such as when you get a long list of phrases and translate them one by one it’s a necessary evil and works well enough for GUI phrases. It’s still tiring and frustrating to use and results in errors due to lack of context, but I don’t know of a better option. It works because the phrases to translate are short and to the point, like buttons and labels.

Using the same sort of system to translate paragraph after paragraph, and sentence after sentence, of long passages of text seems like hell. It also removes the ability to join or split paragraphs or reorganise to make it more natural in the destination language. When the original changes you get a document with paragraphs in mixed languages, some translated and some not. Hence I doubt the result will ever be particularly good or well maintained.

I also don’t think it’s necessary to translate all the documentation.

I think there would be better return on investment in first improving the getting started guide, and then possibly hand translating that specific document, as a single entity, into other languages. That might help new users get off the ground.