id,summary,reporter,owner,description,type,status,priority,milestone,component,resolution,keywords,cc 3014,Plugins: Translate all plugin readmes with Google Translate,gibrown,,"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. ",enhancement,new,normal,Improved Search,Translate Site & Plugins,,,