Multilangual documents

[ChinaeduO]

In would be very nice to have the ability to translate documents. So that one document can be edited in multiple languages. In addition, a DeepL integration would cherry top it.

[tommoor]

I would like to do something here, especially given how good the translation support is for the Product UI.

Do you have thoughts on how this would work?

[tommoor]

In terms of user experience

[microbearlogist]

This would certainly be a key function for the already amazing Outline wiki!

Personally, I'd see it like this:

1. For Editor

Add the possibility of creating a version of a document in another language

Meaning two additional entries in the document's main menu:
Ideally in a separate category between the "Edit/Pin" block and the "Comment/Print" block.

• Add another language
• Define the language of this version

"Add another language" asks you to define the language of this new version from a dropdown menu (showing language supported by Outline), then, by default, the initial document is duplicated to facilitate faithful translation.

When the document exists in several languages, a "language" menu icon appears next to the "Hide content" and "Star content" menus. When clicked, it displays a drop-down menu for selecting the document language. Ideally, this language icon should display the initials of the chosen language next to it (like "EN", "DE", "FR"...) or a flag (see which is more legible).
This menu is used to navigate between language versions.

Alternatively (But that could make things quickly unreadable with a lot of doc), multilingual versions of a document could be displayed in the same way as "Nested documents" in the left navigation menu. But grayed out and with the language specified in (parenthesis). And only when edition mode is activated.

2. For Readers:

• The language navigation menu (same as for the editor).
• Optional function (can be enabled/disabled in preferences): If the document exists in the language of the user interface, then it's the one displayed by default (unless the admin decides to force a default language).

For Admin :

• The ability to force a default document language on the entire wiki.
  (This is to force a reference version, in case the translations are not totally reliable).

I can make a small series of images to illustrate this if that helps @tommoor

[paulux84]

We are managing multiple languages using different collections, but this type of management is really difficult when links to other doc element are added inside the main language because all links must be substituted with links of translated language version.

[tommoor]

Do you actually want folks to be translating the same document into multiple languages? Given how good LLM's have gotten at this task it seems unnecessary and a massive amount of maintenance to rely on humans to keep multiple versions of a document uptodate.

It really feels like this feature would be better implemented through real-time AI translation – define a "primary" language and secondary language and have the secondary ones kept in-sync automatically..

[miikka-virtanen]

Yes, I'd rather have people translate the documents. They can still use AI as a tool for this if they'd like, but implementing translations only through real time AI translations seems the wrong way to go about this. AI translations are not perfect, especially not with less common languages (like Finnish) or documents with highly specific business terms (which do not have obvious translations), and you'd have no control over the results.

I'd rather see this implemented as a generic feature that is agnostic to where the translations come from, and then further AI integrations for those that want them. To help keep language versions up to date, Outline could flag translated versions as "out of date" when the primary language document is updated.