Translating Emacs manuals is of strategic importance

[Stefan Kangas]

Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> writes:

> 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.

It is exactly the opposite, in fact: you start with the small fry, and
work your way up from there.

Few people start a project like "let's translate the ELisp manual",
whereas some might say something like "let's translate the ERT manual".
Then they get confidence and move on to bigger tasks.

> 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

It would have been much better if that had already been copyright
assigned to the FSF and merged into Emacs.

> 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 little, and will save us from ever distributing outdated manuals or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.

We don't need to "magically increase interest" for this work to be
useful, however.  An outdated manual in a language you can read is
infinitely more useful than a bleeding edge one in one that you can't.
We just have to make sure to date it or say which version it covers.

Furthermore, even a halfway house gives a starting point for someone to
continue the work later.

We have huge number of potential users that do not speak English
fluently to the level where they're able to read our manuals.  Thus,
translating manuals to other languages has strategic importance, if we
want to promote Emacs and free software.  Therefore, I think that we
should not take a defeatist stance here.

While we might currently lack the resources to lead the charge, we
should not discourage people interested in doing the work.  On the
contrary.