Gauging interest in localized documentation controls

Evolution Discussion
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one of the things that surprised me as i am upgrading swiftinit.org is how many people seem to be requesting the site in languages other than english, despite the site being entirely english-only.

nearly 20 percent of “humanoid traffic” ¹ is sending HTTP headers that indicate they would rather browse the site in a language that is not english:

image

(even more interesting, this only counts the primary preferred language; it doesn’t count browsers that are sending things like en-US, pt-BR;q=0.9, for example.)

with that in mind, i would like to kickstart discussions about localizations for the UI controls for swift documentation. some questions to start:

  • is translating UI controls valuable on its own, even if the documentation content remains in english? should the UI language always be aligned with the content language?

  • should UI language influence things like sorting order of symbols?

  • is anyone encountering actual difficulties accessing swift documentation because the rendered UI is only available in english?

  • if so, what languages should become the highest priority?

[1] traffic that does not display obvious signs of being a robot.

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You should treat this estimate as the upper boundary. The real % of people who want to see the docs in their native language is much lower.
Although Microsoft supports other languages in docs. Not for everything and not for all the languages, but still. The major thing is they also translate the documentation articles, not just the UI.
Examples:

So no, not really, IMO. The people who have to learn a programming language/framework in their native languages will learn it somewhere else, by articles, books or whatever. Translated UI of the docs website won't help them. And the people who are already experienced enough to read documentation are fine with English mostly.

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that’s what i suspected, i'll hold off on pursuing this further unless someone else makes a compelling case for localizing the documentation controls. thanks for the input!