Explore technologies for improving the workflow of translating documentation
Our User Guide is currently in 4 languages. But the non-English versions are significantly out of date. When content updates happen in the English version, it's difficult to propagate those updates to the non-English guides. Likewise, any content updates which happen in non-English guides (though rare) are never captured in other guides.
I had some in-person conversations with people at the UK sprint in October 2017 where we talked about this problem. Here are some actionable ideas we came up with:
- Research other software projects to see how they handle this problem.
- Look for tools (even if in vain) which might be able to extract gettext from Markdown, slice it into translatable chunks, and compile it back into Markdown. (Because if we could do this, then we could use Transifex to translate docs.)
- If we're stuck with our current tooling, consider adopting the following workflow:
- Choose English as the master language.
- Only make content updates to the English guide.
- Propagate content updates to the non-English guides by doing a git merge of the English guide into the non-English guide and using the merge conflicts as indicators for pieces of text that require manual translation. Do this process regularly so that the non-English guides don't fall out of date.