Add i18n support to martin book

[sharkAndshark]

Solution 1

The most simplest way is just copy .md files to another directory like:

├── fr
└── en
    ├── src
    │   ├── introduction.md
    │   └── quick-start.md

Solution 2

Sadly mdbook not support i18n natively, see this issue
Add translation with google/mdbook-i18n-helpers

Installation and init workspace

Install

cargo install mdbook-i18n-helpers

Init

cd docs
MDBOOK_OUTPUT='{"xgettext": {}}' \
  mdbook build -d po

Add translation file for French

msginit -i po/messages.pot -l fr -o po/fr.po

The translated fr.po would be something like this

Translate to French

download and use Poedit to edit fr.po file

Build and serve and CI

Get inspiration here

[CommanderStorm]

I'd prefer not to add this. Writing documentation is already challenging, and keeping a French version up to date—especially since I'm not very confident in the language—isn't something I feel I can take on right now.

[sharkAndshark]

‘Fr’ is just an example. The i18n support doesn’t mean we’re adding the full French documentation(or any other language). But we could attract contributions to translation maybe if we add it.

I'd love to add translation to zhCN.

[nyurik]

on one hand, more documentation is always good. On the other, I am worried that we won't be able to maintain it properly, and it will cause more harm than good because different languages will have less information than english...

[sharkAndshark]

You are right. We have no too many contributors to maintain them. Just want to help many friends they don't like to read English docs loll. Anyway I'm open to this. We would do that when people ask it.

[nyurik]

i understand, but in the age of AI, it is far easier to just use an automatic translator than to require humans to maintain it - and to NOT match the english version. So I would rather add some links to google translate, than to maintain multiple languages ourselves.