Documentation translation (idea for 2022)

[hturner]

Suggested by @tdhock in R Contribution Working Group meeting, consider a translation project for 2022, e.g. of R manuals or documentation.

[SangeetM]

Excerpt from R Contribution Working Group meeting
"TH: Would translations fit into this? e.g. of R manuals/documentation"
Did @tdhock mean to say translation of the manuals/docs into other languages (apart from default English), similar to what is found here?

[hturner]

Yes, although as noted at the top of https://cran.r-project.org/other-docs.html, that page is no longer maintained. So an initial task (before making the proposal) would be to review which documentation is actively maintained/what other translations are available. Then we would need to consider which documentation is most important to translate into which language(s) to have the most impact.

[hturner]

Noting here as something to bear in mind for project: in the past, there have been issues with spam links (and worse) added to the otherwise well-translated information. This is one reason why the R project has found it hard to maintain a directory of translated material.

[tdhock]

I would think the introductory guides may have the most impact for beginners to R who do not read English.
More advanced material such as Writing R Extensions may be useful.
But google translate gets 95% of the job done, so maybe it is not so worthwhile to spend GSOD effort on translation?
e.g. Google translate of one paragraph from Writing R Extensions into French is actually pretty comprehensible:

1.2.4 Utilisation du code C ++
R peut être construit sans compilateur C ++ bien qu'il en existe un (mais pas nécessairement installé) sur toutes les plates-formes R connues. À partir de la version R 4.0.0, un compilateur C ++ ne sera sélectionné que s’il est conforme à la norme 2011 («C ++ 11»). Une mise à jour mineure41 («C ++ 14») a été publiée en décembre 2014 et sera utilisée par défaut à partir de la version R 4.1.0 si elle est prise en charge. D'autres révisions «C ++ 17» (en décembre 2017) et «C ++ 20» (avec de nombreuses nouvelles fonctionnalités en décembre 2020) ont été publiées depuis.

[hturner]

Closing this issue as we went with #3 for GSoD 2022 and we have hired writers for this project - https://github.com/rstats-gsod/gsod2022/wiki/GSoD-2022-Writers

If people would like to work on this issue on a voluntary basis or plan to make a proposal to another funding source, please reach out via one of the following:

• R-Devel Slack #core-documentation channel
• R Contribution Working Group meetings
• R Contributors Twitter DM

This idea can also be proposed for GSoD 2023 when that repo is set up.