Translations of the manual?

[Halloyo]

Hello,

While I like to think that my English is rather good, there are times when I struggle to understand what is written in the manual (especially when it is related to maths like for formulas). I was wondering if there were any plans to create a translation for another language? (Btw I'm French)

[jsmorley]

I think this exchange should answer your question:

https://forum.rainmeter.net/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=34800#p172784

[Active Colors]

As such kind of topics keep appearing several times a year at least during ten years of my observations I want to write a message here for anyone who wants to do it and for future similar authors.

It is gonna be a hard and time consuming work, not just translating it but keeping it updated as there are always updates and changes applied. It is never going to be actual and nobody will be able to verify the translation continuoulsy. And nobody will take the responsibility to continously track the changes and translate it on the go. Imagine this as Wikipedia, when you open the same article in the different language it is everywhere differently structured and has different information. And in Wikipedia there are thousands of people working on it. Here it is less than ten. In Wikipedia this kinda works. Imagine if the English article is very detailed but the same article in French is short, in both cases they tell the SAME IDEA using different words and different amount of details involved. In Rainmeter such thing will not work, because here it is not an idea, it is a TECHNICAL DOCUMENTATION of EVERY SINGLE available feature that is continuously and constantly upgraded, updated, changed, and expanded.
Hence, shared Google Doc approach completely out of discussion as somebody proposed it in the previous thread.

All right! You can say — "let's make a system like a language hub that will reflect every feature in all languages automatically, like, it will just reflect the whole documentation and people will be able to translate whatever is not translated". Yeah, this TECHNICALLY might work, but PRACTICALLY not so much.
First of all, there would be a custom solution with backend and frontend needed to reflect all the changes everywhere and send some sort of notifications or show in a dashboard of every language hub that there are new parts for translating or updating appeared. Hence when a dev updates a part let's say about Windows X, Windows Y then if it was already translated into French, after updating this section in English — what the French section should show in such? To keep it actual it will have to show the English language but the previous French translation will have to be archived, then reviewed and then updated. It will be hard to create such a system and to find all the compromises. And if somebody really wants to create such system and creates it in the end there has to be some community of volunteers who know Rainmeter well and who could be trusted by the devs or community and they would need to distribute some sort of an access to the system in order to work on the all new changes and expansions happening in the documentation. And in all ten years of my spectating on this topic I saw NO ONE to think how it is all going to work and who will have to take care and keep taking care. And there is not just one language and not just one community. I doubt devs need another thing to control and take care of somebody or groups of people who has to take care of something. It is just a lot of work. People come and go, and therefore noone and nothing can be trusted in such situation.

I am also telling you this as a person who was a part of such community once before. They tried to translate the documentation into Russian. It was a VERY tedious and hard work for the WHOLE community to keep up with all the parts and amounts of the documentation and keep the proper meaning. Not even speaking of occasional arguments appearing on the go and extra consultations with the devs. After one year of hard work everyone just dropped because it was too much of everything for everyone.

Speaking of Russian, there is a very good Russian proverb about this:
"Measure 7 times, cut 1 time"
(Original: "Семь раз отмерь, один раз отрежь")
So I hope you think twice or seven times before you start doing this. Please take care about your time, possible commitment, nerves, and the time of the devs and the hard work they will have to do instead of focusing on the actual product, and your hard work which could get drown into a void.

[Lssg97]

It is gonna be a hard and time consuming work, not just translating it but keeping it updated as there are always updates and changes applied. It is never going to be actual and nobody will be able to verify the translation continuoulsy. And nobody will take the responsibility to continously track the changes and translate it on the go. Imagine this as Wikipedia, when you open the same article in the different language it is everywhere differently structured and has different information. And in Wikipedia there are thousands of people working on it. Here it is less than ten. In Wikipedia this kinda works. Imagine if the English article is very detailed but the same article in French is short, in both cases they tell the SAME IDEA using different words and different amount of details involved. In Rainmeter such thing will not work, because here it is not an idea, it is a TECHNICAL DOCUMENTATION of EVERY SINGLE available feature that is continuously and constantly upgraded, updated, changed, and expanded.
Hence, shared Google Doc approach completely out of discussion as somebody proposed it in the previous thread.

Hi, I just saw the topic related to "translation manual" from the forum, and I have a little idea for your reply.

I am a Rainmeter user in China. First of all, due to the unique network reasons in China, there are some difficulties in accessing Rainmeter-related official websites and forums in China (in fact, it is often not accessible and requires a VPN), so the promotion and development of Rainmeter in China is very slow, mainly relying on Chinese Rainmeter users to build their own forum and "Baidu Tieba" communicate and spread. It’s even harder for newcomers to learn Rainmeter, not only because they don’t understand English, but they don’t even see the latest official Rainmeter manual.

In order to solve the above problem. Some people (or teams) in China have translated the full content of the official Rainmeter manual in detail. The most common Rainmeter Chinese translation manual currently available in China was translated in 2014 and disseminated as a PDF file. Obviously, it is outdated, but it is translated completely and clearly. Helped a lot of Rainmeter users in China.

In September 2019, another person combined the official 4.3 manual with the existing Chinese manual to update the translation of the manual. The translation and proofreading work took almost half a year. It was not published until February 2020, and it is still in the form of a PDF file. Although the latest Chinese translation manual has not become popular, I guess that the official version of Rainmeter 4.4 is coming soon. Perhaps the newly translated manual became popular and became outdated immediately.

I said these are actually to express a point of view: the official should actually consider the translation of the manual. Just like software translation work, translation work can be done voluntarily by users in various countries. Although it may not be updated in time, as long as there are Rainmeter users, someone will always do it. Officials only need to provide a server to store these translated texts, so as to ensure real-time updates of translations, instead of becoming outdated just as popular as PDF files.

Finally, I would like to say that I hope the official can optimize the ability to visit Rainmeter's official website in China.