Multilingual Android Sdk Documentation [closed]

Question

We have a social responsibility project aiming encourage young people to learn mobile application development. The main problem we face mostly is language. Most of the young people in our country don't have sufficient english knowledge to be able to search or learn something in english. That's why our one of the biggest difference from the world wide tutorial/learning sites is being in native language.

As a supporter of the project in the technical side, we answer questions, write blog posts and try to help people learn mobile application development in their native language. One of the problems i face with while helping people is the inability of providing official references(in native language) about the responses we gave. This problem pushed me thinking about translating whole android sdk documentation to our native language :) I know it's a huge job, we may try to crowd-sourcing it i dont know but the thing i want to ask here is just suggestions about implementation of such a project.

What kind of technology would you use, how would it be possible to stay synch with the recent versions of the sdk. Do you think the current android sdk documentation pages auto-generated completely? Is it just java-doc? How to support multi-languages with java-doc? Or with any other way?

I hope questions will not be closed being unrelated, it is a completely technical question.

Thanks everyone

Answer 1

Interesting question!

I guess not only do you want the Java documentation, but also the tutorials and everything that is provided by developers.android.com.

I think you should ask Googe / the developers of Android directly for support, e.g. here. I'm pretty sure they like the idea and support you with that by giving you access to some feed that keeps the tutorials up-to-date. An independent solution would be to implement a crawler for developers.android.com and track the changes yourself. Yet I don't know how much effort you can/want to spend on that.

For the crowdsourcing: I did a project once for crowdsourced writing error correction, where we used Amazon Mechanical Turk. It is used for translation too. It is quite easy to build your custom tasks for the crowd and to automate the whole process. They provide a Java API, for example. It costs some money, but is quite cheap in comparison to professional translators.

Just some suggestions...