Should we build a multilingual docs?

[samzong]

llm-d is now very popular in China, my team in-depth study of the llm-d, but I found that our documentation site is still relatively early, I hope that the available multi-language version of the knowledge.

For me, I can participate in contributing Chinese documents.

[jjasghar]

We should probably open this up to the whole community to discuss, but here are my core thoughts: The main challenge in that, as this project is mainly written in English, the amount of work the translators will need to keep up with will be unsustainable with the resources we have for this project. We are a small team, primarily comprised of volunteers (or paid staff from our companies), and we will need to find dedicated translators for each section of the documentation, which is a time-consuming and potentially problematic process.

I don't speak Standard Mandarin, and there's no way for me to know if one of our translators includes something harmful or hateful in the documents without someone willing to report it. Not to mention that if the translators don't keep up with the documentation, it can become very stale very quickly, causing more problems for our non-English speakers, as they will encounter issues with outdated information and ultimately resort to reading the English documentation anyway. As this erodes the integrity of the non-English documentation, before we know it, the work the translators have done is...futile.

This is a risk vs reward situation. If we can find a group of people that's "larger" than our English first community, I think we should take this seriously; otherwise, the risk is too high for eventual superfluous work.

I can be talked out of this if our whole community decides it, but we'll need to establish a solid translator peer review process and committee to ensure this doesn't go off the rails.

P.S.: It's fantastic that you want to contribute, @samzong. Please don't let me discourage you from your eagerness to help. Starting with the more general community documentation instead of the technical documents is a good place to begin. Still, again, we need the whole community to speak up here before we start down this rabbit hole.

PPS: @petecheslock @jessicachitas luckily docusaurus has an i18n built in, so it is possible, but back to the whole peer review process and multilingual committee: https://docusaurus.io/docs/i18n/introduction

[terrytangyuan]

Second to what JJ said above. It would be hard to maintain the translations. It would be better to only keep a single source of truth (in English). There should be plenty of translation/AI tools to help with non-English speakers without having to maintain separate translations. One other challenge is that translations on specific terms/jargon in Chinese may not exist yet.