Is it possible to translate help files? I see there are some localization options for GUI, but not for help. I think this would be really helpful for users who don't have English as their primary language. Because all the online help is created from text files, it should be not that difficult to maintain different language versions (e.g. to mark them as not valid when primary documentation in English changes). Regards, Tomas Greif [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
Tom?? 1. Your concern is valid, especially now that R has become so widely used throughout the world. But language translation is hard. 2. Warning and error messages are short, and relatively trivial to translate. 3. There are tens of thousands of Help pages in thousands of packages, most separately maintained. I would guess that the best option would be to try to run the files through a mature, open source translator, if such exists. However, I'm ignorant of such matters. And my understanding is that at present, even the best may not be adequate (Help files have to accurate in exact detail). Best, Bert On Fri, Aug 2, 2013 at 2:54 PM, Tom?? Greif <tomas.greif at collectionspro.eu> wrote:> Is it possible to translate help files? I see there are some localization > options for GUI, but not for help. I think this would be really helpful for > users who don't have English as their primary language. > > Because all the online help is created from text files, it should be not > that difficult to maintain different language versions (e.g. to mark them > as not valid when primary documentation in English changes). > > Regards, > > Tomas Greif > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-help at r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.-- Bert Gunter Genentech Nonclinical Biostatistics Internal Contact Info: Phone: 467-7374 Website: http://pharmadevelopment.roche.com/index/pdb/pdb-functional-groups/pdb-biostatistics/pdb-ncb-home.htm
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> -----Original Message----- > From: jim at bitwrit.com.au > Sent: Sun, 04 Aug 2013 10:28:42 +1000 > To: tomas.greif at collectionspro.eu > Subject: Re: [R] Internalization of help pages > > On 08/04/2013 10:20 AM, Jim Lemon wrote: >> On 08/03/2013 05:34 PM, Tom?? Greif wrote: >>> ... >>> Any idea how to create proof of concept for this? >>> ... >> Hi Tomas, >> Here is a translation of a short .Rd file for one of the packages I >> maintain. It took me about five minutes to translate it into Spanish >> using Google Translate. I am not a good enough Spanish speaker to judge >> the grammar well, but it seems to adequately convey the intent of the >> English version, which is also attached. >> >> Jim >> >> > Oops, I forgot that .Rd files will get stripped from the message. Here > they are inline: > > \name{add.value.labels} > \alias{add.value.labels} > \title{Add value labels} > \description{A?ade las etiquetas de valor a una variable.} > \usage{ > add.value.labels(x,value.labels) > } > \arguments{ > \item{x}{La variable para agregar las etiquetas.} > \item{value.labels}{Las etiquetas.} > } > \details{ > \ samp {add.value.labels} a?ade etiquetas de valor como los de un > archivo > .sav SPSS. Esto hace que sea un poco m?s f?cil para pegar en las > etiquetas > de valor que se han perdido o no existe en el primer lugar.} > \value{ > La variable con las etiquetas a?adi?.} > \author{Jim Lemon} > \examples{ > fgh<-data.frame(sex=sample(1:2,20,TRUE),viviality=sample(1:3,20,TRUE)) > fgh$sex<-add.value.labels(fgh$sex,c("Female","Male")) > > fgh$viviality<-add.value.labels(fgh$viviality,c("Alive","Dead","Zombie")) > } > \keyword{misc} > > \name{add.value.labels} > \alias{add.value.labels} > \title{Add value labels} > \description{Adds value labels to a variable.} > \usage{ > add.value.labels(x,value.labels) > } > \arguments{ > \item{x}{The variable to add the labels.} > \item{value.labels}{The labels.} > } > \details{ > \samp{add.value.labels} adds value labels like those from an SPSS .sav > file. > It makes it a bit easier to stick on value labels that have been lost > or were > not there in the first place.} > \value{ > The variable with the labels added.} > \author{Jim Lemon} > \examples{ > fgh<-data.frame(sex=sample(1:2,20,TRUE),viviality=sample(1:3,20,TRUE)) > fgh$sex<-add.value.labels(fgh$sex,c("Female","Male")) > > fgh$viviality<-add.value.labels(fgh$viviality,c("Alive","Dead","Zombie")) > } > \keyword{misc} > > ______________________________________________ > R-help at r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.____________________________________________________________ FREE ONLINE PHOTOSHARING - Share your photos online with your friends and family! Visit http://www.inbox.com/photosharing to find out more!
[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 at 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 CanadaThe 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
On 08/06/2013 12:12 AM, Tom?? Greif wrote:> 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. > ...That was essentially the way I did the translation. I was thinking more of a distributed solution, with either package maintainers or foreign language R groups (or both) creating packages with non-English help files that could be downloaded from non-CRAN sites. The Babel problem has flung many an open source project into a tar pit of ever-expanding dimensions. I liked the following:> 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 >but maybe getting most of the people to speak English all of the time (pace Abraham Lincoln) remains the optimal solution. Jim