Weblate improvements @ R Project Sprint 2023

[daroczig]

Planning to work on the already listed ideas and collaborate with others to improve the current service at https://translate.rx.studio

[daroczig]

cc @lawremi @MichaelChirico if you might be interested

[hturner]

Thanks @daroczig. It would be great if you could make a PR for a proposal on this, with some background for people new to the Weblate server project.

@alswajiab this project may be of interest to you with your experience in sys admin and translation of technical documentation.

[daroczig]

I've written up a draft and published at https://contributor.r-project.org/r-project-sprint-2023/projects/weblate-improvements/ (and at #16 as per the instructions) -- any feedback is highly appreciated.

[hturner]

Looks great, thanks!

[jeroen]

This is maybe a tangent, but are there efforts on the way to support (partial) translation of R manual pages? rOpenSci is interested in translating documentation of packages. Does R already support this, or should I start a separate discussion for this?

[aitap]

Not as far as I know. It's possible to stick something together by combining \Sexpr[stage=render]{} with gettext(), but the resulting user experience for both the documentation writer and the translator is sub-optimal. Additionally, PDF documentation becomes very fun once you need to typeset non-Latin scripts. It's not impossible, but will likely mean requiring a Unicode TeX engine like XeLaTeX and adding some facilities for the package to declare a font with which its documentation can be built: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-package-devel/2023q2/009197.html For now, a package can declare its Language: in the DESCRIPTION, but that's it.

[eliocamp]

It'd be interesting to talk to r core about it. We've exchanged emails with Hadley about this some years ago and it lead to this proof of concept: https://github.com/eliocamp/translated

It uses some weird feature of help that allows you to type es?function to get to an .Rd with a function-es alias. I don't think this is the indented use, but it's what we currently have. But before running with it it might be good to talk with r core.

A better option would be to have some mechanism for help to read the locale option and try to look up the appropriate documentation page, though.

[jeroen]

OK let's start a separate topic about this, to see what it will take to get proper support for this in R: #19