Translating notebook contents

[edublancas]

Hi! I'm currently working on creating Data Science tutorials using Jupyter. Since we want to reach a wide audience we are thinking of translating our materials.

We want this process to be transparent for the user so I was wondering if it's possible to develop a plugin/extension. Maybe add buttons to select a language and automatically translate markdown and comments. (problem is, we want to avoid users have to install extra things, and maybe just adding JS code would be better)

There are some JS libraries to do the job so I don't think it would be hard to implement, but I'm seeking advice from Jupyter experts to know what's the right way to do it.

Thanks!

[bollwyvl]

The dev team has been mulling over the internationalization of documentation, UI, etc. in the core itself for some time... some new work coming up might actually encourage that.

I think supporting actually authoring multiple languages in a notebook would be great. That would be worth an extension, and might actually require a change to the notebook format. no doubt this has been discussed before.

But to go quick and dirty, a bookmarklet-kind of thing would be great. It could certainly add a new button. You can hook into when markdown cells are rendered, and apply a translation. Here's an example of hooking that event:

• https://github.com/bollwyvl/nb-mermaid/blob/c52be964e23f366cc40889a3fe8b8055ca95e63d/nb-mermaid.js#L48

Code comments would be harder... the best approach would probably be "line widgets":

• https://codemirror.net/demo/widget.html

Unfortunately, I don't have any examples of using that in the notebook.