User Guide Translations?

Several community members have expressed a desire for the CI user guide translated to another language (French, Persian, etc).

How important is something like this? Would you be willing to help with it?

James Parry
Project Lead

I work already on a german translation.

I may be able to help with brazilian portuguese translation.

I am fluent and literate in Spanish and English, having grown up as the son of American expats living in Mexico. I would be happy to contribute to a Spanish translation.

Hey, don't work without a PHP debugger. Several free IDEs have this features built in. Two are NetBeans and CodeLobster. Without a debugger, it's like you're driving with a blindfold on -- you are going to crash!

Translating the user guide in to other languages will be a great thing as far as from the developers side. Most of the people still cant barely read English. Also the translation to other language will increase the CI users.

viraltalks

I am fluent and literate in Spanish and English, having grown up as the son of American expats living in Mexico. I would be happy to contribute to a Spanish translation.

I am already the translator of the system language in CodeIgniter to spanish, so it'd be great if I had some help for the user guide, it could be a great project, even if it's a big work. I think a translation would make CodeIgniter more international.

I can help with indonesian translation.

The translation may help developers that don't speak english (I think that there's a lot of them), and may to attract more developers to the framework, but we have to pay attention with the updates in the documentation, because in the translation of php documentation there's so much out of date/incorrect informations, and it may confuse the developers.

(I can help with the brazilian portuguese translation)

Having talked this over with the other council members, it is unlikely that we will look at user guide translations as part of the framework itself - the user guide is too extensive, too variable, and there are too many languages.
We aren't discouraging such translations, but will probably only provide links to them, without endorsing them, perhaps on the CodeIgniter website.
In any case, talk about user guide translations for CodeIgniter4 is premature, as the structure and content is still far from finalized!

"Off the record", sharing my own opinion, I actually do discourage third-party translations. For the following reasons:

- A single translation error may (and IMO will inevitably) cause confusion at best, or expression of what is completely opposite of the original texts.
- With the exception of a few languages, our team has no way of even verifying the correctness of translations.
- Whether we like it or not, English is the de-facto universal language of our profession and it is EXTREMELY hard to progress without it. Therefore, avoiding it by using translations is counter-productive and an inherently bad idea.

I know many would want to simply wave-off that last point, but it is simply the reality. English is not my native language too - I understand how you feel - but we have to accept it.