Re: On Translation Issues

[Pádraig Brady]

On 28/02/2024 09:16, qxrh_0228 wrote:
> I hope you can come up with a Chinese version. I believe there are a lot of 
> users from China who have the same idea as me. Thanks

We have basic support where required, like locale month abbreviations in ls:

  $ LC_ALL=zh_CN.UTF8 ls -l / | head -n2
  总计 20,480
  dr-xr-xr-x.   1 root root     0 2023年 7月21日 afs


Also prompts, errors, and --help output are translated, e.g.:

  $ LC_ALL=zh_CN.UTF8 ls --help | tail -n4
  GNU coreutils 在线帮助：<https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
  请向 <http://translationproject.org/team/zh_CN.html> 报告任何翻译错误
  完整文档 <https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/ls>
  或者在本地使用：info '(coreutils) ls invocation'

Note the online manual referenced above does NOT have
translations for any language, and the translation project
used for help messages and other strings does not have
support for such translations as far as I can see.

I see emacs recently discussed translating their texinfo manuals at:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-texinfo/2024-01/msg00057.html
As it stands I only see one file for one language at:
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/doc/translations

Now stepping back a bit, perhaps at this stage rather than
persisting specific translations of specific snapshots of the docs,
perhaps we should leverage the increasingly sophisticated translations
provided by LLMs, to provide more up to date and varied translations.
It would be cool to integrate that seamlessly into the GNU info reader
and/or online versions of the manual.
For illustration, ChatGPT gave this for the start of the ls manual:

10.1 ls：列出目录内容

ls 程序会列出关于文件的信息（包括目录在内的任何类型的文件）。选项和文件参数可以任意混合，如常规操作。
后面的选项会覆盖不兼容的早期选项。

对于命令行中非选项的目录参数，默认情况下 ls 会列出目录的内容，而不是递归地列出，并且省略以‘.’开头的文件。
对于其他非选项参数，默认情况下 ls 只会列出文件名。如果未指定非选项参数，
则 ls 会在当前目录上操作，就好像它被调用时只有一个‘.’参数。

cheers,
Pádraig