Multilingual documentation

There are plans on this but there are numerous tasks to be done that are prerequisite to this feature request. The biggest one is upgrading drupal.org from Drupal 5 to 6.

In the meantime, feel free to translate some handbook pages to your language and collaborate with your language community (http://drupal.org.es). Drupal.org handbooks are Creative Commons licensed so there will be no problem with that. The "Drupal Cookbook" for example has a german translation at http://www.drupalcenter.de/drupal-kochbuch.

The Drupal community is taking care of documentation and efforts are concentrated per language but presently not on D.O. Good examples are handbooks of Drupal China (http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&u=http://drupalchina...) and Drupal Norge (http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&u=http://www.drupaln...). Your language community, Drupal Hispano seems to have good documentation as well. Regarding blogging, like english, blogging useful resources and information on different sites is also a good thing as you see in http://drupal.org/planet and Drupal in other languages are also rich in resources.

When we have the tools and be able to cater documentation translations here on d.o., then for sure, we will coordinate with the language-specific communities to help us out migrate their documentation here.... I surely will :-)

If you also want to help us with this feature request, you can probably investigate on this, like possible contributed modules and their limitations (probably how we can overcome those limitations as well). How do you think we can effectively go about it... coordination of efforts from language-specific communities, maintaining and adminstering? Will it be better to wait for the internationalization improvements in Drupal 7? etc. I am actually trying to investigate on these things myself and trying to find effective solutions to suggest. It would be great to hear different suggestions to come up with the best solution :-)

So I'm marking this as postponed until the upgrade to D6.

I would have to say that this probably should be a multi-site case, with each language with own document queue, forum, etc.

At this time, it has been determined that this is a road that we will not go down, due to numerous reasons. This is a very complex issue, many different language communities have different attitudes (pro and con) about it, and we have no plan for actually maintaining multiple languages on d.o. It is a long term goal to serve non-English communities better, and will need to be addressed after we have basic IA reworked and the new site launched, hopefully in 1Q of 2010.

It's 2013 now. Can we restart this discussion?

Here's my take on where we're at:

Infrastructure
Although D.O was upgraded from 5 to 6 (see comment #1 above), we're again waiting for an upgrade (6 to 7) before any changes can be made.

One bright spot is that we're getting closer to having a separate sub-domain for documentation (something like help.drupal.org) which will allow us to implement and configure tools that are optimized for the docs.

One of the new features on our wishlist is the ability to subscribe to and be notified about changes to pages. This would be important if we wanted to have people "owning" the translation for specific pages.

Content architecture
Even with new tools in place, we'll still need to do a massive amount of work on the content architecture before we can even start to think about multilingual. For example, users still can't even view version-specific guides like a Theming for Drupal 7 guide, instead they have to wade through D5, 6, and even 8 content.

And I wanted to note that creating multilingual software documentation is a much more challenging undertaking than, for example, a multilingual version of Wikipedia, partly because of the nature of the documentation content lifecycle which has to be constantly updated in a timely manner, partly because of the need to map the content to a coherent structure (i.e. it's not simply a collection of discrete articles loosely joined by tags).

For myself, I definitely won't be able to give this any attention for the forseeable future, there are just too many other pressing issues related to the new tools infrastructure, creating content for Drupal 8, and generally managing content but I don't want to cut off the discussion.

Requirements
Finally I wanted to present a few thoughts on what a (very theoretical) multilingual system might require:

- Translation must always be one way, from English to the target language. In other words, new content or changes could only happen in the English version. Although it would be nice to allow people to write in their own language, we absolutely need a canonical version of the content and we desperately need to control the quantity and quality of the content. For example, we don't want to get into a situation where people are fixing incorrect information in the translated version and not in the English version. And we wouldn't want a feature documented in another language but not in English.

- Comments would have to be disabled (this will probably happen for English content anyway). We would need to figure out how to handle issues filed against a translated page.

- Any effort to go multilingual would have to start very small, perhaps as a pilot project with one language, be focused on what is most broadly useful (e.g. the installation guide) and have some boundaries on what gets translated.

Those are just a couple of things off the top of my head. There would obviously be a lot more. Perhaps someone should start a page to spec out what multilingual documentation on d.o. would look like.

But in any case, I really have to stress that multilingual documentation is not likely to happen on d.o. anytime soon. But it would be nice to be clear on what is we're talking about since it might influence how we tackle some of the higher priority items.

I think having docs on a separate site would be ideal, but that might not make it much easier to make it multilingual. As LeeHunter in #6 says docs evolve continually, and not only single docs pages but also the docs structure. Keeping translations constantly reorganised with new structures as well as docs changes to land in translations is a lot of constant work. Also sharing code examples, screenshots etc. shared consistently between translations could be a challenge. As we have seen with just trying to translate the Drupal 7 announcement to multiple languages, that was a scheduling and organisation feat in itself. Doing that for the whole of docs sounds like a huge undertaking that would need dedicated people long term to even just coordinate it.

Did not want to restore the tag.

If/when we get the hypothetical Curated Docs system deployed, that would be translatable and multilingual (that will be Drupal 7 and possibly on a separate site -- see http://drupal.org/node/1095012 for specifications).

It is my opinion that having translations of the Community Docs is kind of doomed -- the pages are of varying quality and accuracy anyway, and they are in constant flux (plus littered with comments of varying utility). But translating a set of vetted documentation is more viable. I think we should focus on that first.

Also, as I've been commenting on other issues recently... In the past we've basically decided that drupal.org is in English, and we've encouraged communities to form their own web sites in other languages, with their own documentation: http://drupal.org/language-specific-communities -- I am not sure why we would want to change that policy for the Community Documentation?

Since multilingual documentation is clearly not going to happen for the foreseeable future (if ever) I'm going to mark this as closed, won't fix.

translating a set of vetted documentation is more viable

Now d.o has localization of d8 release texts, so maybe it makes sense to re-open the issue?

At least for reason to translate core8 modules pages

Probably this issue belongs in some other issue queue, as it's about drupal.org infrastructure/improvements.

And see also the User Guide project, which will (eventually) (hopefully) be translated:
https://www.drupal.org/project/user_guide

What work, if any, is there to do here?