Decision

<aside> ✅ Option: Why?

</aside>

Context

Should we invest in translating our docs? A few facts:

The Chinese market needs the documentation to be translated. It’s a must-have for them.
Translating the docs is part of it, but having issues, changelog, and support in Chinese is actually what makes it work.
Doing the translation property will require us to invest 12 months upfront. So that we can actually see the ROI. We have tried small efforts in the past, but they didn’t work. It's all-in or nothing.

The cost of having translations comes in different shapes:

Transient cheap translation. We could decide ****to have all the translations done by Google Translate. These translations won't be of great quality, so not enough to cut it. However, would this incentivize the community to fix the translations each time they see a mistake? We have never tried this strategy, but if it works, it would lead to cheap translations until fixed by a community member.
Paying translators. Let's assume that the above “Google Translate + fixes from the community” is not going to cut it; we would need to pay translators to do the work. According to https://translate.mui.com/project/material-ui-docs/reports/project-status we have 170,000 words to translate. At $0.10 per word, and having to translate twice, each language would cost in the order of $25k/year.
Maintenance overhead. From ****time to time, we have to fix bugs that are created because we translate, e.g.:
Translation operation. The act of translating involves operational work. There are Crowdin sync PRs to merge, e.g., https://github.com/mui/material-ui/pull/32213, translators to find, translators to pay, etc.

Proofreading. Good translators are proofreading the English content. When Danica Shen was working on it, she found an interesting number of bugs in the English content.
Chinese market. See the value in ‣.