Migrate to automatic README translation

[rickstaa]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Keeping the documentation up to date and managing the PRs would be more manageable if we switched from manual to automatic README translations (see https://github.com/dephraiim/translate-readme). The downside is that there might be some errors, but this shouldn't matter for understanding how to use GRS. Google has become quite good at translating languages in the last few years. The upside is that we no longer need to look at translation PRs, we can support more language, and the translations are up to date. We can add flags to the readme for people to choose their language.

[Pranav2612000]

Hey @rickstaa
I would like to work on this one. Is it fine?

[rickstaa]

@Pranav2612000 First of all, welcome to the commuExcellent! Amazing that you want to help us improve the maintainability of the repository. I am unsure how hard it is to implement this feature and whether https://github.com/dephraiim/translate-readme serves our needs. The implementation found in translate-readme is quite basic (see https://github.com/dephraiim/translate-readme/blob/main/index.js). It could therefore be that it does not filter the query parameters found in the code blocks.

It could therefore be that we need to improve this action or create a new action.

My original idea

• I wanted to eliminate the manual translations that users add since these are outdated and hard to maintain.
• I wanted a GitHub action that translates the README into other languages and adds these translations to the repository.
• This action should keep code blocks that contain the query parameters in English.
• I planned to add these translations to the main readme using flags on mac and Linux and country codes on windows (see Issue with country flag and some emojis are not visible  missive/emoji-mart#559).

🇳🇱 🇫🇷 🇺🇸 🇩🇪 🇮🇹

[rickstaa]

@Pranav2612000 Looks like the https://github.com/dephraiim/translate-readme does not yet support HTML it could therefore be that it does not suit our need (see ephraimduncan/translate-readme#1). In that case, we might need to improve this action or build our own action. This would likely require us to add some regex to filter out the HTML and code blocks and put them back in. If you want, you can run some tests to see how good the action is and decide if you still want to take on this challenge 👍🏻.

[Pranav2612000]

Yeah. Took a look at https://github.com/dephraiim/translate-readme and I agree we'll need to modify this a bit. I'll see if I can come up with something so that we don't translate the query params and only translate the non-code text.

[rickstaa]

@Pranav2612000 I did some research, and the paid google translate API does handle HTML code (see https://cloud.google.com/translate/docs/advanced/translating-text-v3). However, it does not filter markdown code blocks and will likely translate code in those blocks. These blocks, therefore, have to be filtered and injected using regex. Further, google will charge $10 per million characters after the 500000 chars per month have been used up. Users have to set up an API key to get it to work.

In contrast https://github.com/dephraiim/translate-readme uses https://github.com/iamtraction/google-translate/blob/master/src/tokenGenerator.js#L73 which simply makes a call to the translate.google.com. The results are therefore more unstable, limited to 5000 characters and require more regex filtering before they can be used.

Therefore, I think this should be possible both with the free and paid versions, but it does require significant development time to filter out markdown code blocks and HTML.

[rickstaa]

Still, feel free to try to tackle this if you think it can be done in the time you had set for implementing this feature. 🤔 I think both versions (paid and free) would require some parsing to ensure that markdown code blocks and HTML code are still valid. I did not search yet, but there might be some packages that can already provide this ability.

[andrii-bodnar]

Hey everyone,

How about using a localization platform? I like Crowdin - a cloud-based solution that streamlines localization management for your team. It's free for open-source. Crowdin allows the community to collaborate on content translation and there is a possibility to set up an automatic translations synchronization using Crowdin's native GitHub integration or GitHub Actions.

Node.js CLI Apps Best Practices - an excellent example of a project using Crowdin for translating content by a community + GH Action for automatic synchronization.

I would be happy to help with the setup.

[parinzee]

Hey there! @rickstaa I think I can tackle this. If you could assign this to me that would be great. Also you would be willing to use paid solutions right?

[rickstaa]

Hey everyone,

How about using a localization platform? I like Crowdin - a cloud-based solution that streamlines localization management for your team. It's free for open-source. Crowdin allows the community to collaborate on content translation, and there is possible to set up an automatic translations synchronization using Crowdin's native GitHub integration or GitHub Actions.

Node.js CLI Apps Best Practices - an excellent example of a project using Crowdin for translating content by a community + GH Action for automatic synchronization.

I would be happy to help with the setup.

@andrii-bodnar Thanks for your message. I appreciate you trying to provide me with a solution. 👍🏻

I checked your profile and see you are a software engineer at Crowdin. I don't care since you offer a valid solution, but some people might fall over that. Maybe next time, add a disclaimer to your comment.

Having that said, I checked your documentation, videos and platform, and I have to say that I'm impressed by the tool you created. I think it is beneficial for streamlining translations for big projects. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. For our small project, however, I think it does not offer too much improvement over the translations.js we are currently using.

The main thing I am trying to solve with #2053 is to eliminate the manual translations of the readme we currently use since these are often incorrect and outdated and clutter our PR backlog. I am therefore looking for an action that uses a service like a google translation API or the free google translation website to do the translation. I found https://github.com/dephraiim/translate-readme, but as explained above, it does not support our readme because of the HTML and markdown code blocks.