[Development] Another feature request for qdoc - multilanguage support

[André Somers]

Hi,

Op 2/17/2012 7:22 AM, liang.qi at nokia.com schreef:
> Hi, all,
>
> Not every developer is good at English. Many of them would like to see the documentation in their own language.
>
> David Boddie had done some work before, under qtdoc/doc/src, there are ja_JP and zh_CN directories. For separated doc files under qtdoc/doc/src, they could be translated into Japanese and Chinese. That works fine.
If a dedicated group of translator is willing to do the work, and to 
keep doing it for the forseeable future: fine. However, I fear 
translated documentation will start to lag behind the originals rather 
quickly. You cannot expect the developers to care about documentation 
translations.

> But for the API, the doc in each class, it doesn't work. There is a sub-task for that:
> https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-12919
>
> I think we have 2 approaches to do that:
>
> 1. split the doc for api from the implementation file, for example qobject.cpp ->  qobject.qdoc
I oppose this idea. Please *don't* do this. In the previous qdoc thread, 
I argued that I think documentation should - if at all possible - be 
directly above the relevant code. Otherwise, it will start to lag 
behind. This suggestion would imply a move in the opposite direction, 
separating code and documentation completely. That sounds like a Bad 
Idea(TM) to me.
> 2. use the script to extract the doc parts at first, then use qdoc to process them
Fine by me. I could imagine some form of XML output from the code 
parsing stage, that can then be translated if anyone feels up to it, 
after wich both the original output and the translated versions can be 
processed further. However, before such work would be started, I think 
it would be wise to make sure that there is actually a need and a drive 
to make such translations. If I look on DevNet, I don't see a lot of 
activity on the language forums as compared to the main English ones...

To be honest: my take on this (as a non-native English speaker, but from 
a country where almost everyone learns it to a decent degree) is that if 
you are serious about learning to program, you'd best make sure you have 
a working knowledge of English. But I know people will disagree with me 
on that.

André