Re: Translation of manuals

[Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> And again: the rate of change of the misc manuals is quite low.  If
> and when someone will decide to translate the Emacs user manual or the
> ELisp reference manual, then we'll have a serious problem with keeping
> up with the rate of changes.  But not before that.

I think this might only be true of the SES manual and not of the others,
if my observation that many of them receive updates at roughly monthly
intervals is correct.  Taken alone this figure is not all that daunting,
but it is substantial enough that with the resources our translators
will be realistically capable of dedicating to the task of updating
them, they cannot match this rate of change, and the translations will
remain outdated most of the time.

Considering that several of the frequently updated manuals are merged
from external sources with their change history lost during transfer,
this rate probably doesn't reflect the true frequency of changes being
made to them.  On the contrary, it is much higher.

It doesn't help that the originals of a number of these manuals are also
written in a different markup language, and remain that way prior to
their compilation during the Emacs build process.

As such the question becomes whether we should be maintaining these
translations at all; here are some arguments as to why not:

Besides help2man (whose info page turns out to be far too small to be
worthy of consideration), there are no GNU projects in the business of
translating their manuals to languages not English.  The manual of most
interest to our users is the user manual, with the Lisp reference manual
a close second, and if we balk at translating these two, the purpose of
translating the small fry is defeated by the certainty that their
intended readership will already have read documentation in English.

What's more, there is a translation of our user manual being circulated
over the Internet _right now_ on sites bearing no relation to us:

  https://crowdin.com/project/emacs-manual-chinese

To all appearances it has lost most of its momentum, which is the
probable fate of any like translations that we should take charge of:
there's no reason to believe that merely providing accommodation for a
translation will magically increase interest in its upkeep to a level
sufficient to make it sustainable.

Maybe we should leave aspiring translators to author translations of our
manuals at their own pace.  It's no great loss if users have to search a
little, and will save us from ever distributing outdated manuals or
concerning ourselves with rescuing them when (not if) interest in them
diminishes to a level where it is not anymore possible to update them in
tandem with changes to their source documents.