A few hopefully relevant thoughts about translating docs<p>1) translating a piece of english UI will almost double the length of it. That's annoying.<p>2) documentation is hard to write and to maintain, and sometimes it's hard to read and use documentation. Creating multilingual documentation is even harder, and it's nearly impossible to have an entire coverage of the docs in all languages, which leads to incomplete or outdated/incorrect documentation - which, as the saying goes, is worse than none. Multilingual software inevitably makes the documentation situation of a software worse. Trying to apply language A docs to a language B interface is hell.<p>3) documentation alone isn't part of the story; forum threads, answered support questions and that kind of discussion-style paradocumentation is ranges in importance from helpful to just full-on essential and that kind of stuff is never <i>really</i> translated. Trying to get help from a mostly english community for a software translated is hell.<p>4) The sublanguage used in a given UI isn't written in a given tongue; really, it's written in a pidgin made of the original language of the application <i>plus</i> the slang of the domain of the application, which is usually tied to one, say, culture or spoken language in particular; very large software also typically creates its own sub-language, which separates itself from actual tongue the UI could say to have been written in. After all, any description of a what a software does, expressed in a language evolved for the interaction of human beings in the real, material world, <i>must</i> be a vague and fragile metaphor. Translating metaphors is nearly impossible. It's hell. It's poetry, but when poetry is not the goal, it's hell.<p>That also means that to read the documentation and UI of an application amounts to learning the sublanguage of that application, which as I explained is different from the actual human language it was written in. I can understand that "save" means "serialize the relevant subset of the application state to a file" without knowing anything about the "dictionary" meaning of the English word "save". It's not the same thing. "Save" could be replaced by "blub" as far as I'm concerned, but it's convenient for people who speak english to associate "serialize" to the concept of preserving, of keeping. But it's not as important as the consistency of the language developed to describe the concepts and operations of that application. A single "blub" is better than "Save" <i>and</i> "Sauvegarder". Duplicating the pidgin a software develops for itself makes using that software a special kind of hell.<p>Conclusion: it's easy to end up in situations where I have to use french software here in Quebec. Most of my friends have laptops and phones with french UIs. It makes using them a pain in the ass.<p>I absolutely, deeply despise translated UIs; translating a UI is almost systematically a counter-productive activity. It's hell.