After giving some thought to the translation of documentation, IMHO I consider that it is a titanic task and maybe it is not worth the effort.
The Translation will be a titanic taskI give you our experience with the User Guide which represents the largest part of the documentation contents. We translated it into Spanish for our customers (store owners). We decided to only translate 2/5 of the guide for the admin (catalog, customers, sales, promotions and contents). It also required to insert new images with all texts translated into Spanish. We hired someone to do it, because we had no time to do it by ourselves. It took about 2 1/2 weeks; so the whole guide could take around 5 weeks. The translation is so costly that we have just done it for v1.9 and later updated for v3.1 and we don't plan to do it in the next future.
The Developer guide on the other hand would require more effort per page to translate because it contains very technical stuff that cannot be handled by any person with knowledge of English. That would be the case for other technical documents.
Given the complexity of the task I doubt that you will get volunteers to do it. It was difficult to get volunteers to translate the text for Wikipedia (I translated it into Spanish and later to German and French with some volunteers to help me to brush it up) and there were other voluteers for 2 or 3 more languages. On the other hand you got many for the short texts for the
Installation Page and the
Microsoft Web Platform. Our own User Guide would not help because we have changed the look of the back end. I think it is much better and easier that volunteers give their time to enhance the contents in English.
Is it worth to translate it?Well we have the experience of the Nop forum in different languages. They were simply not used and later were cancelled. I have only seen some posts in Italian, Turkish, Russian ;-) and much less in 3 or 4 other languages including Spanish. I think that most developers have a working command of English; so the effort would be worth for store owners who want to take the whol task (installation, administration, updates, etc.) themselves. I don't know how many of the Nop stores are in this case.
Our experience is that Nop admin is very intuitive and the usefulness of the user guide is marginal. We have some customers who manage their store without any previous training (which is given for free). Our training session takes just 2 or 3 hours and I feel that they don`t make much use of the guide.
SuggestionsA good summary of the User Guide that could be translated into different languages would be a table with the list of features (similar to the f
eature list in the Wikipedia) with 3 more columns each with a link (and maybe a short explanation in complex cases such as the product attributes) to:
1) an example in the demo store
2) the corresponding example(s) in the demo admin.
3) the corresponding explanation(s) in the English User guide
That may require that the Nop demo is enhanced to encompass examples of all listed features
Some other short sections of the documentation could be worth to translate: What is Nopcommerce, System Requirements and Copy Rights. The summary (maybe shortened and with just the first 2 link columns) and these 3 sections could be also inserted in the Nop Site (nopcommerce.com) to have it summarized in more languages which would be much more valuable to market Nop worldwide.
It is important to see
what do others think about this issue
