We need a multilingual version

[ArioneDev]

I'm happy to tell you that plugdata is very popular in China, but I found that many beginners face great difficulties learning plugdata because of language barriers. Will you consider adding multilingual support in the future? I can even put together a Chinese translation team to help you!

[dromer]

Although not trivial I think it could be done for menus and interfaces, however Pure Data is inherently English.
Things like object names and help files etc. cannot be localized.

Would that be enough though? If you really need all of PD localized to a different language then this would only be possible (I think) by completely modifying PD itself, which would be completely out of scope for plugdata of course.

[ArioneDev]

Considering the project is quite challenging, I've already started preparing to launch a project for translating tutorial documents! Thanks for the response!

[timothyschoen]

I agree this would be great. Translations for the main UI are very doable. Object names and such should not be translated, since that would also cause patch incompatibility. Starting out with something like: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German would cover a large part of plugdata's userbase. But that would require volunteers for all of these languages.

The main issue is translating the built-in documentation (for tooltips, reference panel, etc) here: https://github.com/plugdata-team/plugdata/tree/develop/Resources/Documentation. This is at the same time the most impactful but also an impossible amount of work: just maintaining the English versions is already quite a pain. The only way I could see this work is with automated translations, but that will inevitably make mistakes, and possible translate Pd-specific terminology that would best be left untranslated (like "bang").

[ArioneDev]

Haha, translating the built-in documents is indeed a tough job, but my friend has already started translating the first chapter of the documents. I’ll let you know if there’s any news!

[dromer]

We have over 1500 json files right now, so this doesn't really scale well when adding more languages. Next to being a momentous effort of course.

[timothyschoen]

That is indeed a concern, and on top of that ELSE still has API changes at times, so we'd need to ensure the translations all stay correct