[wp-meta] [Making WordPress.org] #3014: Plugins: Translate all plugin readmes with Google Translate

[Making WordPress.org]

#3014: Plugins: Translate all plugin readmes with Google Translate
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 Reporter:  gibrown                  |      Owner:
     Type:  enhancement              |     Status:  new
 Priority:  normal                   |  Milestone:  Plugin Directory v3 -
Component:  Translate Site &         |  Future
  Plugins                            |   Keywords:
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 In the course of looking at building an neural machine translation (NMT)
 system for WordPress strings, I also evaluated Google Translate. The NMT
 version of Google Translate does a much better job of translating HTML and
 special characters. It still will not be at all perfect, but I think it
 would be worth experimenting with translating the readmes for all plugins
 for a few languages.

 The problem we can solve: Search is pretty terrible in most non-English
 languages because most plugins don't have translations. Even though the
 search is terrible, about 20% of all searches occur in non-English langs:
 https://make.wordpress.org/meta/2016/08/30/initial-analysis-of-plugin-
 search-logs/

 Evaluation of Google Translate: https://github.com/Automattic/wp-translate
 #translating-with-google-translate-api

 Our search mostly only cares about what individual words are in the
 README. Even if the translation is not good enough for an end user, just
 by having a translation to the user's language we should be able to
 provide much better search results.

 When the user reaches the plugin's page we could either:
 1) show them what we have as our best guess at a translation (maybe a
 native Spanish speaker can comment on what they think of these errors for
 the Jetpack README translations: https://github.com/Automattic/wp-
 translate/blob/master/gt-translated/wp-plugins-jetpack-stable-readme-
 es.diff)
 2) or we could just show them the English version and count on them to use
 an in page Google Translate or similar feature.

 Either way, the ability of non-English users to search for plugins in
 their own language seems like it would be a win. Maybe having search
 results could even drive users to translating the plugin READMEs. In cases
 where the plugin was auto translated we add some UI to indicate that, and
 can direct users to glotpress for fixing the translations.

 I'm not positive how well this would work, but I think it may be worth
 trying.

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Ticket URL: <https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/3014>
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